Morning Star Overture
by NovusScribo
Summary: At the beginning of 4E 200, three very different novice candidates become friends in Winterhold's new southern outpost in Falkreath. What unfolds in the next year leads to winds blowing eastward, and everyone knows what has happened. This is background for one of the characters who watch Skyrim become a civil war, most importantly underlined by the Thalmor.
1. Chapter 1

**4E 194** Early Morning Star Near Fletchersgate, west-central Falkreath

Tatiana Meda Rutila had requested half a day alone in the Collegium to gather her thoughts, so the cooks and cleaners were given the time off in town to do as they pleased. Today she would become the Domina, the master mage, there in Southall for real. She had wanted the place cleared of eyes and walls scrubbed of ears for a least one discussion with her new, junior associates.

Tatiana was seventy-five. She hailed from no special family distinction in the ancestral clans of the eastern Cheydinhal mountains of Cyrodiil. Folk from those parts were stoic about their duties to the Empire. Far enough removed from the marble halls and riviera scene, their society's hallmarks were the strong roots of family and association in the network of hamlets and townships, and had not changed much after the Great War. As such, Tatiana's name was only the singular common name for a peasant born to underclass parents, a plebeian with a _praenomen_ to City society. Her father had been a trapper and sometime soldier in the mountaineer cohorts, lots of archers and knife fighters, her mother a general laborer in their tiny mountain village with a few huts clustered around a storehouse and a forge. Tatiana was backwoods hardscrabble, a highlander, and so was not bound by lineage to a mountain thane or jarl (to use the Nordic) and found it easy to leave and enlist with Main legions in Imperial City, ship off.

The Great War had come when she was herself an expert in healing and destruction, one of the Emperor's two-fisted auxiliaries on the front lines not too far back from the first pila. After the war she had been granted an audience with the Emperor Titus Mede II along with others of her rank and file. Recognition for Tatiana's particular service at Red Ring, the major concluding engagement of the conflict with the Aldmeri Dominion, was a place on the rolls of the emperor's own family, the gens name of Meda, along with the cognomen of Rutila honoring her as _the Red_.

A decorated veteran with the royal name could expect choice postwar opportunities. Since that time she had spent most of two decades expanding her repertoire past the first and ten (and triaging the results), leading Tatiana all over Tamriel to discover new dimensions in travel, seeing, and appearing. A little over a year prior she had received word from Winterhold expressing the desire to expand the College's reach across Skyrim and perhaps make the diplomatic gesture to all Nords. She was content with the travel her life had thus afforded her, and was not unmindful of her great fortune at still being alive. _The move to Falkreath may be my last,_ she had thought _, and I want to pass on what I know for reasons less worldly, or at least in a different sphere._

In the afternoon she walked to the front doors of the Collegium and pushed one open gently. There were the magistra, the lower adept in charge of ushering novices chosen from the field of candidates, and the centuriana who would patrol. Magistra Raynu, an 89-year old Bosmer orphaned at birth and raised by adoptive Nord parents, listened intently to the words of her long-sought mentor.

Centuriana Ulia Swain, 40, was arriving with over twenty-three years' service in the XIV Southern Legion, the last eighteen of which had also been as personal housecarl to Cenric Eodsbury, thane of Fletchersgate's lands.

"And where is our colleague," Tatiana asked.

"Haven't seen 'er," Ulia said casually.

"Well, then, would you be so kind as to go find her highness and tell her we have a meeting?"

Taking orders didn't phase Ulia at this point, not a _prima ordina_ in the I Cohort who dined at a lord's table. The subject of her next task was the new adepta for instruction, a Nord born in the Valenwood forests of the wood elves.

Earlier that week Ulia and Cenric had been arguing in his study.

"You want to do what?!"

Ulia took a breath and rolled her eyes. "I want ... to help out ... at the new ... college, Cen. I'm bored as hell."

"That's stupid," he shot back, "there's plenty to do here! I need you _here!_ "

"No, Cen, _you_ have plenty to do. I stand here all day, walk your damn carpets, listen to you bitch about your tough life while you sign bills."

Cenric had worked with Ulia so long that any pretense of liege disapproval with her tone would have been comical, and besides, she was right. He just liked having her around.

"You have your own house guard plus twenty of my own I Cohort here in minutes. You don't ... need ... _me_."

He started to say something, and Ulia waved her finger at him.

"Uh-uh, no. Not this time."

"Fine, go," he closed his eyes and leaned back on the edge of his same desk, "play mage and all that.

"You know where I'll be, right up the road? I'm not leaving the hold."

His eyes opened, and he looked at her.

"I'm just giving myself a new assignment. While there's peace."

"Yes," he agreed.

Ulia found Juo next to the stream where the novices fished downhill from the college. The centuriana had developed the eyes and ears (and nose) for troop behaviors, and something the magistra had said at the Cock and Bull Tavern in Fletchersgate told Ulia this hellion peacock had a few of the ways to go with the outfit. Juo Objulilla Fiolitan, alchemical synthesis of four cultures and master mage at 24, lay on the grass with a smoking twist of dried elve's ear to her lips.

"Ahem!"

Juo blew out a cloud and crooked her vision up at Ulia.

"T'sup?"

"You realize the new domina and magistra are waiting in chambers for your worthiness to appear."

"Shhyeah," the young expert snorted and stretched.

Ulia squatted down with her hand on the sword pommel. "And you plan on gracing your new employers some time today?"

Juo coughed and forced a yawn.

"Well?"

"I have ... _plenty_ of gold ... and all over the world, might I add," the adepta smiled with her eyes closed. "I don't _need_ ... _that_."

Ulia stood up and crossed both duty and economy off the list, coming to another item. "Are you _really_ an expert mage, miss," the officer smiled as she looked out beyond the glistening brook over the wildflower fields, and to no quick response.

"Better believe it," Juo said as she tossed the charred leavings, standing up and looking Ulia in the eye, "and I'm not under your juris _dic_ tion." The last bit came with squinty sneer.

"No," Ulia said calmly with her hand on the end of the baton tucked in her belt, "but Mistress Tatiana still holds a tribuneship in the Main. I suggest you remember that when you go shooting your mouth off about either the Legion or the Empire, unless you think you are eminently irreplaceable," she concluded with a grin.

"Fiiiiine!"

 **4E 170** Mid Year 12 Mondas After 11pm

Her turn had come at the head of the line.

"Name?"

"Ulia ... Swain," she answered the _veterana_ , stepping forward from the tent entrance.

"Birthday," the figure in field plate asked without looking up, scratching an iron stylus across the page.

"Um?"

The officer looked up at her. "Your _birth_ day?"

She felt her face go hot. "Ssss-seven, Second Seed, 153, ma'am," she managed to answer. The stylus dropped. Nothing but a husky chuckle from behind the desk broke the humid night. Ulia could only stare into her smiling face as the legionary sat back with her fingertips touching, and more than the summer heat trickled down both of her temples.

"And why," the recruiting officer for the XIV Southern asked with a smirk, "do we need another camp lizard, hm?"

"I ... "

The officer shook her head slightly and exhaled through her nose as she pushed the heavy wooden command chair back, stood up, and walked around the front of the desk, leaning against its front edge with her steel greaves and arms crossed. She looked in her fifties. Her face retained traces of a sharp Cyrodiilic nose, now crooked undoubtedly from fighting, in a sunburnt visage with scars on cheeks puffed out from salty living. As she smiled, Ulia saw multiple gaps in the teeth between blistered lips. _This woman is an Imperial_ , she repeated silently, _do not smile or cry_.

"You can work the camp," the officer said while running her eyes casually up and down the young Nord, "as a washer or a cook, or," she chuckled slyly, " _selling_ whatever you like. But you are not joining the army. Next!"

"But ... ma'am! I mean, officer ... I mean," Ulia stuttered.

"Out," the officer yelled, pointing to the tent's entrance.

"I have something! For the Legion!"

At this, the veterana dropped her head slowly and put her hands on her hips, walking with gaze back up directly in Ulia's eyes and stopping with toes nearly touching. She said nothing.

"Um ... heh, I have this," Ulia pulled a quilt purse.

"Are you trying," the older woman said quietly, slowly, without taking her eyes off Ulia's, "to bribe an Imperial officer?"

"No," Ulia shook her head, keeping her eyes up, "no. I was told that if I had a contribution to make to the Legion ... that I could enlist before I turned eighteen."

"And who ... told you ... that," the officer asked coolly, "hm? Where you from, girl?" She craned her head to the right and motioned inwards over Ulia's shoulder with her right hand.

"Mm-my farm is," she got out before having her left shoulder bumped from behind. An unshaven Nord man in dirty smith's frock appeared.

"In other words, Second Seed second-squirt, you don't know anything. Get out," she ended with a brusque hand-toss towards the camp.

Another hour or so of interviews went on inside the tent of the _campidoctor_ , the drill instructor and recruitment officer for the fourteenth legion of the southern corps. Ulia had taken a seat on the grass in the shadows near the tent, just inside the nearest brazier's firelight. Her stomach ached with hunger. She had sat in a crowded wagon full of sweating commuters for ten hours in the sun earlier that day, and had had only a hasty couple of tavern eggs and piece of bread with a mug of watery lager at half past four that morning, the last of five days from her family's homestead east of the Falkreath capital. The wagons had followed the inn trails a day north, then stayed in a group on the northwestern trade highway to the south's most expansive set of Legion installations. In order to save money for her enlistment, Ulia had slept in a barn, two empty stable stalls, and a root cellar in exchange for chores, mostly washing dishes after the taverns cleared. Last night, she tried to smile as she shook an ant off her hand, it had at least been a little saddle soaping. _Like I'll ever be cavalry_ , she thought. She had only the gray wool trousers, undyed cotton smock, and well-oiled riding boots that she wore other than a staghorn-handled field knife and the 25 gold septims from her parents.

The last potential emerged from the tent and took position in a rough square of those remaining from the initial line of some dozens that had formed earlier that day. About one in five had walked off dejectedly, stomped off, or just disappeared into darkness since she had been waiting in line. Ulia stood up quickly and rushed to the edge of the group just as the campidoctor walked out into the night.

"So youuu," the officer began with a loud pronunciation of the second word, abruptly stopping as her eyes moved to Ulia. This time there was no smirk. "You! I told you to leave!"

"Yes ma'am," Ulia shouted, stepping forward and performed the best at-attention that she could imagine. This drew a few snickers, yet not too many. The veterana had a darkened haft in her right hand, and tapped its end on her left palm to dead silence. She walked over to Ulia.

"You have something for the Legion, huh? Let's see it."

Ulia felt her lower back tighten. She let her eyes drop a moment and drew in the quietest breath she could as she held out the coin purse, looking back up at the officer's eyes. The campidoctor was walking towards her. _Do not smile or cry_.

"Well-well," the Imperial said with a singsong as she grabbed the purse and weighed it, tossing it up once, "you can buy us one new _pugio_." As fast as she had turned to seemingly walk the length of the group's first line, she whirled back around and drove the end of the truncheon into Ulia's stomach with both hands. The girl from hold farm country fell to her knees and inhaled hard, eyes bulging. The officer just as quickly brought the haft down across her shoulderblades hard enough to knock her on her face.

"You don't buy your way into the Legion, bitch!"

Ulia's vision completely blurred. She fought for breath and tried to push herself up, then felt another stab through her eyes and a ripping pain on her spine as the officer stomped her back with a hobnailed sole, and her face hit the ground. All Ulia could do was hug her stomach, pulling in breaths, restraining the sobs that had started. She didn't receive another blow, and the officer's feet did not move from where she stood a couple paces away. She could taste the blood running down her face from her nostrils as she involuntarily spat on the grass. Ulia heard nothing but the white buzz of the last minute. Her gasps for air became more drawn out, and she pushed herself from hands and knees to a single knee, then stood upright. She could barely see the campidoctor.

"What's it gonna be," the form barked at her, slapping the end of the haft on her palm.

Ulia stood up straight and drew in her last gasp. "The Legion, ma'am," she replied firmly through tears.

The form walked closer and became the hardfaced officer. "Hear that," she yelled with her eyes in Ulia's, "she's our first name! What's your name, scrub?!"

"Uuu-uli-aa Ss-sw..."

"Aha, no!" The officer paced up the first line staring into each of the other sets of eyes. "I don't think so. You," she stopped again toe-to-toe with Ulia, "are a whore."

Up until now, that type of language had only been used in moonlight gossip or her parents' admonitions about the cities. Like many of her kindred in the countryside, her family made little use of politics but remained faithful to traditions such as harvest and meal blessings. Her mother had insisted she and her six siblings learn the rites to the goddess and apply them, especially Ulia, her fourth of seven children born during the Second Planting celebration on the cusp of spring and summer. Kynareth, she had told Ulia, was watching your birth and has given us good fortune and family.

"No, ma'am," she said with the firmest voice she could muster.

"We," the Imperial said with the end of the haft pushing Ulia's chin up, "will call you _Lizard_ , 'cause that's what you are," her voice lowering to a menacing rasp.

Ulia looked her in the eye, speechless, could not have spoken if she tried.

"So first ... Lizard ... I am _doctor_."

"Yy ... "

"What's that?" The haft pushed back towards her throat.

"Yes, doctor," Ulia said quietly.

The older woman's eyes narrowed, and she pulled away. She walked past a few other recruits, stood in front of an oak-sized man in sleeveless miller's tunic tapping her hand with the truncheon.

"You!"

A woman in a maroon worker's dress motioned for them to walk through the open door. Ulia followed the other women from the recruitment class into a room with rows of beds and tables on either side.

"This," the young Nord announced to the group, "is the women's barracks for your class. You will sleep here when not in the field."

She turned, and walked towards another door at the end of the long room. The beds were plain, sanded timber frames with scarlet woolen blankets tucked perfectly into the sides and end. Each had a two-drawer night table of the same wood. The gray stone floor was as smooth and shiny as the pitted and worn furniture and roof beams. Ulia's group followed the her through the door.

"Here," the ordinary turned in a suddenly warm room, "are the baths."

She walked the length of the room past three stone pools sunken into the timber-floored room. Stopping at the middle of the three, she motioned to the arrangements of decorated ceramic flasks, linen hand towels, and curved bronze implements of some sort.

"You are to bathe yourself. Thoroughly. Start," she pointed behind them, "with the caldarium. Soak in there first. Next," she indicated the middle pool again, "the tepidarium. Wash yourself before you get in. Use the oil, then a strigil ... like this," she mimed the bronze piece up and down her arm, the same from shin to hip. "When you are clean, get out and wipe yourself down with a towel." She sauntered to the edge of the third pool. "Then relax in the frigidarium. Questions?"

Ulia had until this day bathed out back of her family's stables. All year, the tin basin held either well water or rain. In her life she had a handful of times washed in warm water inside a building, like that time the family went to the capital for a Second Seed festival and crammed into two rooms at the inn. There they had an indoor tub of some interesting metal that could be filled with water from the hearthfire for coin. Since it was her birthday, mom had given her a hot bath. She still had the flower garland that she wore that night to the feast, a box by her bed back at home. The Second Seed gown she wore for her eleventh birthday had supplied part of that coin purse's patchwork.

The intense heat of the first pool was a shock. Ulia gritted her teeth and slid down into the water, sat on the ledge built into its sides. The pools were big enough for all sixteen of the women to sit with plenty of room. She felt her heart rate increase and wondered how long they were supposed to "soak."

In their turns the women's class got out of the caldarium and stepped into the middle pool. Ulia found this one much more tolerable, although still quite warm. The lady from the camp had been sitting on one of the wooden benches that ran the length of the room on both sides, and got up to stand over them when they were all in the tepidarium. She gave out a curt remark or two, pointed. The oil was strangely scented, that is, it was at all scented. Ulia had never bathed like this before. It smelled ... like the forest? She did not know.

They all sat in the last, cold pool. Smiles and looks of satisfaction all around, this was what every woman present had probably known all her life, melted snow and rainwater, well water, mountain pools and rivers. Ulia let herself dissolve momentarily in the familiar cold water and tried to breathe through her clotted nose.

The woman who had led them in clapped her hands and had them follow her into another room at the end of the baths. There, they were issued crimson duty tunics, undergarments, and oiled leather bracers.

"What about our shoes," one had asked when all the size adjustments and trades had been made.

"What about them," their leader asked.

They were brought back to the barracks and told to remain while the ordinary disappeared out into the camp. Most flopped down and let out a satisfied exhale almost immediately. Some talked a bit, sat on the edge of the bed. The woman appeared at the barracks door again shortly.

"I," she announced, "am the medica for your training. Each of you will receive a physical examination, and I will fit you properly with boots. You," she pointed to a sleepy recruit nearest, "to the baths," she motioned.

When it came time for Ulia, she found the medica seated at the far left end behind the pools next to an open cabinet. She had never had a physical, and found the woman's questions uncomfortable, and then there was the exam. Dressed again and seated on a stool, she had her feet examined last by the stolid woman.

"Had problems with corns or ingrowns?"

"Not that I know of."

The medica, kneeling at her feet, looked up at her. "I think you'd know if you had," she said and smiled, "just a standard question like the rest of them. We need," she continued, handing Ulia two pairs of tawny woolen footwraps, "to make sure your feet are up to it, above all else. Well," she laughed, "almost all else." She held a studded pair of legionnaire's boots against Ulia's shin. "Here, try these on. You have to make twenty miles in the morning."

The darkness broke with torchlight.

"Quar-TERS!"

Ulia slid her feet to the floor and pushed them into the boots as fast as she could. Through a couple hours' sleep she made out the campidoctor and two other, younger female legionnaires in full armor walking the aisles between beds and shouting.

"Get your sorry ass out of bed, scrub," she heard next to her as one of the new trainers pulled her dozing neighbor out of bed by the lapels and hit her across the face.

"In file!"

All sixteen stood blearily facing forward. They were led out of the barracks to the expansive camp's exact rectilinear forum and shouted into a line next to two lines of male recruits, all receiving the knuckle from legionary men until the campidoctor called time.

Received

Office of Jarl Skald the Elder

4E 170 Sun's Height 09

Falkreath

Posted

Eodsbury Courier Company

Western Highway Lakeview Station

4E 170 Second Seed 11

Hi Ma and Da! I'm at the Lakeview House for bed and breakfast! We got in from the northern road just after sundown, lots of stops to pick people up along the way. When we finally got out, my legs were so sore! I just wanted to sit on the sand next to Lake Illinalta, it's sooooo beautiful in the evening. It was funny. I got chased by this big crab that came out of the water! When I yelled, two of the folks from the wagon came running down the hill, and one hit the crab with a sword! I said thank you, and looked at the thing. Ugh! They took it away and cooked it for dinner at the inn. Butter and spices, yum! You can see the Manor way up the hill from here, such a huge house, I wonder who lives there? Anyway, my candle is almost out and I need to go to bed. I can't wait to join the Legion. I want to come home in the crimson. I want you to be proud of me.

Love,

Ulia

They stood in a square.

"The essence of the Legion," the campidoctor shouted as she paced in front of a table at the center of the camp forum, "is organization. There is a reason why small outposts can manage countries. Organization. The same throughout the Empire. You can count on every last camp in this," she motioned expressionlessly toward the horizon, "country to have the same layout and equipment." She walked down the front file. "See that?" She indicated with a bemused curl to her lips, and walked to the other end of the file, pointing with the truncheon that Ulia's class had learned about at the chow benches, a legate's baton stripped of its silver wolf head and gilt decoration. Marca was her name, a porter had let the class know _sotto voce_ , and she had won that baton defending the legate in battle. The wood had originally been the color of natural timber.

"Gather round!"

She stood behind one of the long ends of the plank table with her hand on the baton, resting its end next to the arranged equipment. The class of sixty recruits jostled for a view in a multiranked semicircle. On the table, one like the refectory ground for their century long enough to seat thirty a side, was a parade ground polished display. There were three distinct grades of armor, several types of weaponry, and shields. The table also displayed an assortment of pouches and rucksacks, belts, as well as the boots and bracers they all had worn since the first night.

"You have until dawn to learn their names. Now line up!"

A bald legionary stood next to a chow table chair and waist-high metal stand with a couple sets of shears and razors.

 **4E 170** Sun's Height 02 10:58pm

"We will get," the campidoctor shouted at the century class, "to more e _quip_ ment drills later. But now it is time that you take your ... oath."

The women's section had been hustled to their barracks by a centuriana and told to line up in file facing the door to their baths. She disappeared into that door, and they waited at attention.

Some time later the door to the barracks opened behind them and they heard the campidoctor's voice walking down their file.

"You," she snapped her finger behind her as she was just passing the head of the line.

When Ulia walked into the baths, she saw the campidoctor standing next to the frigidarium with the centuriana behind a chair and a smoking brazier. She walked up, and the campidoctor took a step forward.

"Are you ready to swear your oath to the Legion, Ulia Swain?"

"Yes, doctor."

"Then raise your right hand and repeat after me ... "

 _Upon my honor I do swear undying loyalty to the Emperor, Titus Mede II and unwavering obedience to the officers of his great Empire. May those above judge_ _me, and those below take me, if I fail in my duty. Long live the Emperor! Long live the_ _Empire!_

"Good, scrub," the veterana said, snapping her fingers at the chair, "now sit and take down your tunic."

Ulia felt a leather strap pushed against her mouth.

"Bite down," the centuriana behind her barked, and Ulia took the strap in her teeth as she had her arms pulled roughly backwards by the wrists.

Marca slid a long iron handle out of the brazier, a white-hot flying dragon in a diamond motif at the end. "Legion for life," Ulia heard as the scream erupted from her throat through the belt in her teeth, the skin just below her left collarbone steaming and the iron clawing down through her heart into the last reach of her living memory. She woke up in the frigidarium, head against the stone lip above the bench. When she realized where she was, the burning on her chest lashed out and she gasped. Ulia held her hand to the burn, and was pulled out by both elbows. The medica's face appeared as she was placed in the chair next to the brazier, and her arms again pulled back. A frigid sting shot through her collarbone and she involuntarily jumped up to be pushed back down by the shoulders.

"Stop," Ulia's teared eyes saw the medica's round face, "we need to cover the salve so you can march tomorrow."

 **4E 197** some time in Sun's Dawn prior to the commencement of Southall's fourth year

"Thank you, that will be all," the thane of Fletchersgate wearily waved the guildsman away, putting his thumb and forefinger in his eyes. His carl walked the last visitor to the double doors of the hall just after seven p.m., the Sun's Dawn snow blowing in. She growled some orders to the guards and turned to shut the doors behind her, walking up the worn Cyrodiilic wool carpet to the steps up in front of the chair.

Ulia had been the carl for Fletchersgate since chosen by the jarl of Falkreath for the young thane Eodsbury after her successful tour in Cyrodiil, and had lived in his service the past twenty-one years. They were only a year apart in age, she and Cenric, the youngest of eleven children from the House Eodsbury, vassals to Falkreath and hereditary castellans for one of its towers. She had been allowed by the XIV Southern to remain on active reserve as centurion after her service in the war. The brass recognized the value in allowing their own to serve in the courts of minor notables nationwide, this giving the dragon a presence, eyes and ears in every new freehold with a timber mansion at its crest whenever a jarl handed out a ceremonial axe to a young worthy, coins not necessarily jingling out of earshot for that one. The invariably young carls, not long from the dragon, would most likely not foreswear the heady mix of torchlight induction, four months' training with almost no sleep, three a.m. wakeups for a beating in the barracks or a supplemental forced run until they puked in the breakfast line. City Main knew what it had done by allowing the Nord jarls to pick from its junior ranks— they would have friends for life in every mead hall in Skyrim.

Ulia had been on duty with when word came that the jarl was showing up the next morning for a surprise inspection of the line. Standing there in file, she had been plucked from the XIV junior centurions for medium infantry by the jarl's secretary and told to report at the new Fletchersgate manor house. _Mmmm ... lookit youuuu_ , her honorable commission had started, yet she still had the cohort behind her and an Aldmeri bronze on her belt, so he had dismissed her with a yawn, and that was the last she would have to do with nobility outside of the Fletchersgate fief.

Nevertheless, she had stayed all these years in with Cenric. He was married to his wife Ainn within the year of his naming, and the carl had bent her knee as honestly as the entire wedding gathering, and for some years to follow. Ulia had been born on a ranch homestead in east-central Falkreath, fourth of seven, no particular political or religious leanings other than her mother's insistence that they invoke the goddess. Her mother and siblings had managed a herd of cattle, and her father took endless rides to the XIV Southern fort selling contracts for jerky by the wagonload. They were not anything close to rich merchants in their farmhouse built over a century prior, but they were healthy among a land full of strife and disease. Ulia took to the boys' games more than thrilling at the merchant coming through town with lace, and had once broken the nose of a self-proclaimed badarse in the fields at the end of her short schooling by the village priest of Mara. When the first signs of the Aldmeri were coming, she had left home on her seventeenth birthday to sign with the Southern.

Between her staid Falkreath blood and the encounter with a smarmy jarl, Ulia had remained unmarried, rising in the XIV to centuriana by nineteen after surviving a death march through the Alik'r desert on her first assignment. She was no prudish devotee to Mara's tourist tokens. There had been lovers in the ranks, fun in town when on leave. Yet she had quietly told the bronze dragon pendant she kissed every night and draped over her sword by her cot, _I will only ever love this, my place and my honor, duty, discipline._

Fletchersgate had been founded on the Hammerfell border by Cenric's family, a minor player in the triangle of Elinhir Redguards and Falkreath City, and he named thane of the surrounding lands. She had always noticed a quiet resignation in her employer's goings on, a fatalistic long gaze in the flawless execution of fief ceremony, business, law, pleasantry. Like countless others across the country you might imagine, she had at least once imagined what the life of wealth and importance like his might feel like, and this tireless routine she observed from her post at the wall disillusioned her after a while. Cenric had very little time to himself. From the moment she stood her post in the atrium on the first floor of the civic building (he had no illusions; this was no palace) at five in the morning all throughout the day, she for years never saw a single individual trait in him. He had never read a popular book in front of her, only sat at all hours at the desk carved out of an Argonian tree trunk there in the second floor offices, scanning documents, signing, making decisions for the omnipresent couriers, soldiers, entreaties. _Yes_ , she had thought on occasion as she unfastened her duties at midnight, sitting on her cot with a slug of brandy, _I am just fine with this part of it, thank you,_ and with that slept well each night.

Cenric got up from the oversized wooden chair and walked down the side of the provincial dais towards a meeting room. He made no motion to her and said nothing. He looked tired. She waited a moment and then followed him into the room.

"Shut the door," he said directly, leaning on the planning table with his back to her.

She did so. He turned much more quickly and sprang at her, pressing his lips on hers. She shoved at him and pushed his body, jerking her arms as he gripped above both of her elbows and wrestled her towards the table. As he pushed her torso, she kicked at his thigh hard enough to have him stumble backward, regaining her stance, and lunged at his body with her shoulder lowered. He beat at the tops of her cuirass and pulled at her hair as they impacted with the wall. She separated from him and spread her arms at her sides with hands flexed, hunching over with bent knees to hit him in the chest with another move. He hit the exact posture as she was holding, pulling the circlet from his head with one hand and throwing it to the side. She loosened one buckle at the side of her bouilli armor. They ran at each other again.

Ulia had by no star thought she would ever end up with Cenric. She had not exactly despised him on meeting her new thane, that day, but had not thought anything more of him than the figure head of her service minutely more important than that of a ranker out in the mud. Years had gone by. He at first attended business as well as ceremony with the young Ainn and they looked the timeless portrait that would go on the Imperial City walls, and maybe mausolea to boot. The Aldmeri war actually brought a flush of pride and energy to this particular fief, one not so hit by the destitutions many localities suffered and helped by its brand new building financed by the Eodsburys. For a golden moment she thought she was living in the bardic traditions themselves, a just thane with his beautiful family at the top of the hold, crops growing, trade increasing.

The years went by, though, after the war and the euphoria of a peace treaty and the local parades faded. Business resumed. Then the politics got nasty between loyalists and dissenters, and a bitter stalemate settled over the national discussion for over two decades. Ulia pressed on in her service to Cenric and his family. He, too, rose before dawn and worked until night. His children grew up, went into politics, divinity, and the Legion cavalry. She didn't kid herself, though, there were plenty of songs in the taverns about the one who just happened to be there.

The two of them found themselves alone, Ulia due to the way she had handled earlier service and avoiding lasting connections in her young doings, Cenric from the demands of a fief. He and Ainn were all but separated, living in the building for appearance's sake. The housecarl had more than once been privy to comings and goings by this or that young man in the servants' hallways behind the official rooms, and had of course kept a stone face, risen before dawn, put on a sword. Ainn had lovers, and Cenric never showed any emotion other than tiredness and gravity with the passing years. He had been a handsome, young man when she met him. Now she saw a much older man with a dim light in his eyes.

"We can't keep doing this," he said to her for the umpteenth time as they lay there on the thin wool over hardwood in the meeting room, and he wasn't letting his arms go from around her.

"You say that," she muttered, rubbing his chest.

"What'r we gonna do, Ulia?"

She didn't hear the next few words. All she thought about was how strange it was to find him, now, after all these years. _What indeed, Cenric._


	2. Chapter 2

4E 200 Rain's Hand 01 First day for the 200 class of Southall Collegium

She had spotted an open seat at the far opposite end of the open-sided refectory in off the college barley and cabbage fields. Walking down the first of two wooden tables with benches that ran within a couple footsteps of the overhang before the plains grass, she passed the edge of the first and slid into the seat at the far side of the second. It was plough time, and she had been assigned to work with a group turning soil at roll call, grateful that this foreign blanket wrap was so big on her since she could wear a layer of fitted woolens under her tunic and trousers. The snow may have mostly melted, but that wind blowing across the plain was bracing to one occasionally finding her mind in the humid trees much further south.

 _How did they manage to settle here? So cold! And look at those with their shirts off after work, taking barrel baths out in the open. Must have horse's blood, the lot of them._

The tables hummed with light talking amidst the somewhat restrained table manners. Magistra, the all-purpose taskmaster, stood over them with her hood thrown back near the door to the college proper, walked slowly around the tables, gave the look to the audibly crude joke or projected belch. It was just the first morning after a night induction to the novitiate for thirty-six candidates. She had made a single statement about expected decorum the previous night, one sentence followed by a question. There were people from the entire continent and all walks of life, all levels of society having only their general level of entering literacy in common, so Raynu had intoned in her rich mezzo the sentence all novices would find on the covers of their blank book of parchment sheets, provided with an end table next to their cots. _All novices are to comport themselves respectably and respectfully as representatives of Winterhold._ There had been no sarcasm at this one.

"Do you understand?"

Aside from beginning her managerial duties over this year's brood, she was starting their training, silently, by listening for complaints or whining. They had not been the only ones coming in from all over the continent to petition Winterhold's new regional school in the center southern quadrant. One hundred and twelve bright, young people had crowded around the front door of Southall Collegium to be handed shovels, mops, scrub brushes, brooms, rakes. There they had been left almost completely on their own aside from the magistra's appearance at the door before dawn to open the building, then once more on her rounds to see them out at nightfall.

They had spent the winter staying in whatever spare room or cellar a local family might have and they cooked, cleaned, minded children for their board while tradespeople went out to the tavern after a day's work. Some candidates had spent the winter in groups of hunter's tents. Each morning before dawn they were sure to be waiting at the door of the college, ready to continue spreading silage in the fields, polishing and repolishing every wood and metal surface of the rooms inside, shoveling the frozen gravel path to the door from the cart road three or four Cyrodiilic miles away.

Last night the adept had announced the beginning of the 200 class by reading off the names of thirty-six applicants chosen to stay, so this morning most were running on a dizzying first stay in the dormitories where they would live for the next six months. Instructing them regally to follow her to the women's and men's quarters in their turn, she unlocked the deep armoires in each and passed out neatly-folded new novice's robes and hoods. Most of the candidates had so thoroughly exhausted what money they had brought to their intern labor that the robes were the only passable clothing they owned, thrown over torn and patched worker's frocks and trousers.

This breakfast was also by far the best meal most had eaten in half a year. Every candidate had gotten some form of the admonishment against imposing on local folk and their supplies during a candidacy. Farmers, smiths, and butchers were not to be asked for a sort of boarder's honorarium, as it were, from the food that families spent the clear months producing, selling, and preserving for the next winter. _You are to perform service for any family nice enough to have you and take what you are served_ , so some had literally subsisted off bits of hardtack and utterly bland stews they made from meat trimmings. The ones out in camps had feast days any time someone appeared with a deer or fish. The Collegium provided no food for their workdays. These advices from older novices and adepts whom prospects had prodded, plied with spirit, even paid in gold came as part of the establishment's public relations drive in a country not altogether sympathetic to their expanded program. Candidates found that while _some_ Nords didn't give them looks upon hearing about their businesss in the area, a noticeable percentage were a little rude, some even hostile in their remarks.

First day! Azuyia put the tin platter of scrambled eggs and hashbrown potatoes covered with beef gravy down on the table with a tankard of thick ale, sat, took a long draught, the whole place lit up with the energy. She was a wood elf, short for her kind and likewise thin. When the magistra had started to hand her an oversized robe, then started to pull out another, she had insisted on the one she was now wearing (to a shrug on the magistra's part). As her family tended to live to the outer end of a Valenwood life, generally at least two centuries but by reckoning several forebears probably the not unusual three, she was at sixty-three physiologically the same as the group she saw around her and at a similar point in her lived experience. Two or three times the number of years, she had said to a Nord the first time asked about Bosmer lifespans, just means you watch things two to three times as long, something like that.

"Morning!"

She beamed at the Nord man sitting across from her, then savoring the first bites of farm breakfast. He had a loaded plate as well, but hadn't touched his food, sat there sipping at his tankard and talking in a low voice to the Redguard man to his left. _Those two are a contrast_ , she thought. Aside from the subtle differences in visage and hair texture, the Redguard's skin was flawless mahogany to the Nord's freckled almond. He's been outside a lot, this one, she thought, and from the size of him not a scribe's son either. The Nord took up half again as much of the bench across from her as the wiry Redguard, and sat a head taller. Nords all tended to be healthily proportioned, the women and the men, even so she wondered how this one had avoided being pressed into an infantry center with a warhammer shoved in his hands.

"Morning, Bos," he said convivially, although without smiling. She had expected the usual jabbing about her ethnicity even here, and had grown to know the difference between a friendly high-five and blatant Nordic racism. So she jabbed back.

"So where ya from, Northman?"

At this her imposing fellow novice cracked a grin. "Eastmarch, little fishing village on the river near Windhelm. Snowmill," he chuckled and took a draught, exhaling, "and we never had a mill," laughing, clunking the tankard back down. He started to eat his biscuits and eggs.

"Oh really," she continued to smile sweetly, this being the first morning's impressions, yet recalling the advice of her grandparents before leaving. Among the Nords, watch out for the ones from Eastmarch, they had told her, most of all Windhelm City. _They don't ... like ... elves._ "Thought I might have heard a northeastern accent."

He eyed her a moment, then saying, "It's out in the boondocks, sis, quite a few clicks from the city. I'm definitely not Windhelm, if you catch my drift."

"Oh, I hear you. I'm Azuyia. Azuyia Aciaea, from Greenheart. Near the southern coast."

"City girl?"

"If you will. Cities look ... a _lil_ different in our trees, but hey, yes."

He extended his hand as he got up to take his plate to the bins near the building door, something Nord men did not so very often do for a female Bosmer, that one she had seen since coming to Skyrim. She shook hands with him feeling the hard palms and thick calluses between his fingers, and on his thumb.

"Denthryd Saltersson. Seeya inside," he said shortly, raising his tankard as he walked to the bins.

4E 122 late Hearthfire evening

Raynu stopped under the single oak tree in the expanse of wheat fields. The Rain's Hand wind tossed her friend's lovely hair across her face. Cylanna had caught up to her after they had been running around the through the wheat. Raynu felt something pressed into her hand, and just as she was looking down felt a kiss on her cheek, then her friend ran off towards the village. Her hand clamped tight. She stayed out past nightfall, pacing around the tree with her fist closed. Raynu opened her hand, raising her open palm to her face. It was a little statue of Mara carved from translucent white stone.

4E 135 Rain's Hand 23 Middas Night

Raynu's Journal

 _Wish I could give back to them as they give to me. Today we had honey cakes and singing because I was born thirty years ago. It's so hard to say anything any more. I don't belong here. My dearest sweet C. grew a long time ago. I wonder what to do. It hurts to think about it._

Raynu got out of her bed after staring at the ceiling for several hours. They had called up, her parents, and she said nothing. The sounds of breakfast downstairs were long past and everyone had gone out into the fields. She sat on the edge of the bed and wiggled her toes on the cool wooden floor. Across the room her clothes from last night were in a heap. She got up and and methodically pulled the trousers and shirt on, wrapped her feet, pushed them in her favorite lambskin boots. Today, too, Raynu put her loaded knapsack on her back by both straps after buckling a blade harness by its strap across her body and belt around the waist, wore the field knife da had given her for chopping brush and protection out walking. She opened the door of her bedroom and walked down stairs, and out to the wheat fields.

She had only one destination in the village left to think about, and walked down past the five farmhouses that made up a place with no name. They lived several miles from the nearest boarding house or merchant's square. It was five families with their crops, animals, and lives. Raynu had never even been far down the wagon road.

Knocking on the door lightly, Raynu stood and waited. It was late morning and most were out in the fields in with scythes. Hrald had waved to her from a dairy stool when she walked by. In a couple of minutes the door opened. Cylanna had her infant son, born just a few weeks ago, wrapped in a cloth at her shoulder.

"Ray, come on in," she smiled warmly, patting the baby's back and walking over to a chair by the fireplace. Coals glowed slightly in the daylit room, the shutters thrown open to the street. "Have a seat," she said, smiling at her son as she lifted him away from her shoulder and held the back of his head in her palm.

"Hi, Cyla. Just wanted to come by."

Cylanna was a handsome woman almost Raynu's exact age. They had been toddlers in the fields those past years ago, grew up running around together. She had reddish-brown hair cut to the the nape of her neck and pulled behind her ears after parting on the side, a hairstyle so common to Nord women with busy lives. Raynu remembered how it had been in the middle of her back when they were teenagers, had thought of the Nord girl like a much an older sister, the way she talked and told her about things. She wore a dress entirely one piece that had a simple hole for the neck, a shirt that extended down to her wrists and ankles, one piece of triple-stitched thick cotton dyed the color of deer hide in the vats of herbs and roots folk had always ever used. She wore low fur shoes on her feet. Raynu had watched her soft face acquire the typical Nordic definition to the jawline and cheeks.

"Happy birthday, by the way," she said, without looking up from the baby, "sorry I couldn't be there. Rolf had a humor, fussed and spit up every time I fed him, needed to stay here quietly."

"It's fine, C. I need to talk to you, though," Raynu said with her hands in her lap, shoulders drawn in a bit. She had always felt a little funny with her arms and legs so different and long, not looking anything like any of the other girls. For that matter, she was the only one in the village like her.

"What is it, love," Cylanna then turned her gaze on the Bosmer.

"Don't say that," she responded plaintively.

Her friend stopped for a moment, looked at her. "Is something the matter?"

Raynu sat there looking at her.

"What?" She looked back down at baby Rolf.

"It's just that ... these birthdays. It's everything, C. I've been thinking."

Cylanna got up holding the baby carefully, kissed him, and lay him gently in the wooden crib with rocking legs next to the fireplace. This done, she turned with her eyes still down at him, then on Raynu, and sat back down with a straight back.

"I'm listening," she said.

"I need to go, Cyla."

"Go? Where?"

"I think you know what I'm saying," Rayu said, shifting. "I need to leave."

Cylanna's mouth tightened and she nodded a little. "I was wondering when you'd come around to this. You've been off for a while now. Your parents ... "

"They aren't my parents."

"Ray, don't say it like that. You know they care the world for you, we all do. We always will."

"What's there for me here, C? Everyone has something and someone. You have Hrald and six beautiful children, ma has da. We all are so blissfully happy," she gestured bitterly, "cutting grain and making flour all year. I can't take this any more." Her friend sat there and waited. "I know I'm not being right. I should be happy. But I'm not. I ... need more. I can't be alone like this."

"You are not alone, Ray," Cylanna replied steadily, "I will always be here for you."

"Cyla ... you remember why I'm saying this."

"Yes."

"I want you to know that ... I'm truly happy for you and Hrald. He loves you."

"Thank you, that means a lot to me. I realize it wasn't fun for you, and ... that it hasn't been fun these years. We are," she sighed, leaned back a little wearily, "a village of twenty-six. Traders don't even know we're here unless we start a bonfire," she laughed.

Raynu leaned back as well. "Yeah, I have been wondering what it's like out in the country, heh, I mean in different parts of the country. We are definitely country," she smiled.

"From what I hear, life could be a whole lot worse," Cylanna leaned back completely, rocked, stared up at the ceiling. "I mean, you've always had the wanderer's soul, but I, too, have thought about what it may have been like, you know, if it weren't Hrald. Would I have stayed? I don't know."

"It's just, hm. I'm Mer, Cyla. I'm the only one here, for starters. I've never seen another Bosmer before."

"I know. I've always wondered when you'd talk about this."

"Ma and da told me a long time ago that there are plenty in Skyrim. They told me that I should go out and meet them."

"You should," Cylanna replied. "I think it would really help, this way you are feeling."

"You know that's not it."

"Please don't. Not now," she said, shaking her head as she continued to rest it on the chair back. "We can't go back in time, Raynu."

"That's another thing. I look at you, and I see you when we were there, and I still feel like that, but there you sit with six children. The way you talk. It's taken me the last couple years to start understanding. I still don't understand."

"It's because I won't live to be two hundred years old. Or three hundred. Ray," she sat up, "thirty is a lot different for a Nord woman. I've given birth six times. Hrald is thirty-seven and has killed. We have seen almost half of a normal life already, maybe more. A lot of people around here don't ever even get as far as we are now."

"Don't say that!"

"It's true. With any luck we'll have twice again as much time to live, or more, but here we can't think so much about things. I mean that with all my heart."

Raynu's eyes teared, one of the few times they ever had. She turned her head and wiped at her face. "I still feel like that day. It's like time hasn't moved for me at all," she sobbed, felt Cylanna's hands press her head against the front of her dress. Raynu cried and hugged at her waist.

She turned one last time a ways off in the wild grasses beyond the wheat fields. Her adoptive parents were still visible, waving. She waved, and turned back to head south. It would be the last time she saw any of them.

4E 146 Last Seed 01 Fredas at lunch Imperial City

Raynu's journal

 _Had an interesting experience this morning. Was out in the farmers' market up near the smithies. On my way to get greens, took that alley near the laundries. Was talking with a tanner at the corner when some guy tries to cut my purse, felt it right as he was through it. Tanner yelled too. I ran after him and got him real good on the arm. Ha, took *his* purse. Made ten in gold for it. He ran away and I let it go. Tanner told me he'd help if I wanted to look around, I said no. Just wanted to get fitted. He said the ten plus another 40 would get me a field set if I helped with the scraping, so I went ahead and did it. Going back tomorrow for more. Anyway, found something with the septims that filcher had on him. Gonna ask A about it._

Atia had closed the tavern at midday as usual so she could clean after the previous night's tenants and make food to serve in the evening. Raynu came in through the delivery door out back with her key, walked upstairs to the main room and set the sack of onions and sheaves of fresh parsley on the work table next to the stoves.

"Wonderful! Get a chance to talk with that Mia about some flowers, hm," she poked.

"Spare me," Raynu scoffed, putting on her apron from a peg there next to the table, taking a knife and slicing an onion, "she's all thrown about some oxbrain in the scribner's guild." She stopped to pick up the parsley and cradle it in her arm like a florist, holding her hair up with the other hand and sticking her chest out. "'Oh, Piso, say that again," she affected two octaves high and swooned her neck.

The Redguard grinned and pushed a cutting board of carrots into one of the stew pots. They worked steadily at slicing vegetables and then mutton and beef cubes for the stews, and then skewered a lamb roast on the spit and rubbed it with spices before starting the slow cook. Raynu washed tankards and plates in the bin of water while Atia wiped tables and mopped the floor.

Later, they sat for a glass of Bruman white and talked at one of the tables before opening for the evening.

"Mistress," Raynu said, "I didn't tell you but I almost got robbed this morning."

"What? Were you hurt," her benefactress asked with a furrowed brow.

"No, but he was," she beamed, "introduced him to Venta." That was what she had been calling an Altmer knife she had acquired, as long as an issue gladius with a finer, harder edge and much faster at the draw.

"Well good, _filia_." Atia had gradually taken on much of her identity from selected Imperial speech and general living over the years since she emigrated from Hammerfell. Raynu did not mention it, and had felt these past few years since coming to work and stay at the inn that their both being foreigners gave them a common language in itself, among the many expatriates residing in the center of the Cyrodiilic empire.

"There was this, though," Raynu pushed the mysterious coin in front of the older woman. At this, Atia pushed back from the table and said something very quickly in a tongue the Bosmer did not recognize, but by the force she gave it was not pleased with what she saw.

"He had _this_ ss?!"

"Yyyeahh ... in with his cash." The coin was about twice the size and thickness of an Imperial gold septim, the standard unit of currency against which much of the Tamrielic continental economy was measured. It was struck from steel or something like it, had the same design on both sides, too, a skull missing the lower jaw in its center with a skeleton leaned up against its left edge. "Where's this from, anyhow?"

"It's from nowhere, it's from death! You need to get that out of here now!"

"Mistress ... what are you talking about?"

Atia had gotten up and taken off her apron, walking quickly upstairs. Before Raynu could follow her, she threw herself down the steps and landed on her feet.

"Take this," she pressed a silver pendant in her hand, old by the dings and dark creases and inlaid with a central piece of amber, "Put this on when you wish to walk briefly unnoticed, and get your things. Now!" Raynu flushed, backed slowly away from her and walked down to her room in the cellar. Returning with her single haversack and cloak, she set the entirety of her possessions down on the table and sat again in the chair next to Atia. Her employer and friend of eight years was staring with a quivering lip at the coin. When Raynu sat back down, she pushed it in front of her.

"Ati ... a? Tell me what to do."

"That," the Redguard told her, "is a Sithis mark."

"What's that?"

"It's an assassin's coin, a killing contract."

"What?!"

"Yes, daughter. Your attacker was hired to do someone in, and not you. If it had been you, he wouldn't have bothered with your purse." She looked somberly at Raynu. "They sell those ... things, the ... main organization. The ones who sit in the shadows everywhere, pouring blood on their dead god ... Sithis." She barely whispered the last word. "This is what they let loose in the arcade ends, places people go to get things done cheaply where you have to know what and who to ask, see? If you know someone sells these, then you can buy a death for a price. You buy a death, and it sits there until some scum asks for the contract, not long here. The buyer of the mark," Atia continued with eyes a little glazed, "pays the dealer for a death, gives specifics I would guess, information for the kill. Addresses, descriptions, names, affiliations. The contract sits there until it's picked up by a thug."

"Dibella love," Raynu gasped out.

"He, or she, takes the coin with the information, and then brings it back to the dealer with some trophy as proof it has been done, and from there receives payment minus the middle. News gets to the buyer, and the coin sits with the dealer for a new mark. See, both the dealer and the buyer are wondering now, and then there's the organization behind these doings out there in the market. You've broken the chain, child, this is a death bought and paid for. Someone will be looking for their lost contract so it can be fulfilled."

"The thief?"

"No. The buyer. That one in the street is gone already. The party who bought that kill will sooner or later know it's missing."

"But ... Mistress. This city. How would anyone know where to find it?!

"Anything of Sithis calls out to Sithis. It's not about being seen and heard in the street. That coin will call it on you, and here."

"Who?"

Atia drew in a breath. "The Dark Brotherhood. The group whose name you must never utter. You have to go. I'm sorry."


	3. Chapter 3

The form of a stag appeared above the plain, moving its luminescent head a little, but otherwise motionless.

 _Bend out the land, dance in blood_

 _Bend out the land, dance in blood_

Anyone close enough saw Tasha Razrtip's lips synchronous with the crowd chant. The flutist's melody mingled with the chromatic tones in an above-super-C wailing, and the two Nordic drummers accompanied. Azuyia could feel the music in her skeleton as if she were standing neck-deep in the waters off southern Valenwood, her entire body lifted and pushed with a current strong enough to make her gasp. The lead musician's guitar had disappeared into an outline of the primal force itself as she screamed an ebony stiletto down the upper frets with one hand and called out with the other.

"Helllllllllllllllllllllloooooooooooooooooooo ... Whiterun!"

4E 200 Morning Star 01 at the Eastmarch seashore north of Windhelm

The old sailor took his walk down past the Snowmill tor and on to the coast. Wulfheard was eighty-one this year. Thank Talos for the peddler through this landing with all his southland _uisge beatha_ and a bit of moon sugar, if you knew how to ask. Wulf, as the villagers called him, still made rope and twine for the carts in to Windhelm a couple days away from their little street of houses and fishery tables. His hands were stiff, though, to say nothing of the knees and back. _Aaaahhhh, the blood warms from a Breezehome song_ _…_ He kept up past the relic stone with a pipe loaded to the brim with catseye powder and took another swig of the amber. Then out at the first dune he felt his face freeze through the holiday goodies.

Wulfheard ran back to the tor. He had first scratched a charcoal rubbing on paper over a decade ago when he had said goodbye to the seafaring life for good. He ran his fingers over the most legible part of the runes:

 _I wandered all the seas to find my shore_

 _I arrived onshore to be lost_

 _Inland Skyrim I only sought the coast_

 _Just to find the hearthfire_

4E 200 Rain's Hand 15 first month at Southall Collegium

Azuyia wrote in her journal during break.

 _There are many theories about the origin of the heart. Not the pulmonary organ, mind you, we're talking the imperial symbol. Some say it's an emblem of a sacred flower. I'd think that story more of the garden variety, a pretty thing to desire in moonlight. Others point to the shape. Presto. The heart of the world. So amusing that I hail from Greenheart._

4E 201 some time in Midyear

Wystan appeared at the door. Azuyia and Ryvanni had been laughing off the rest of the afternoon over tea and bread. They looked at him through high cheeks.

"Letter for you," he said, dropping the envelope on the table in front of her. "Was at the notary this morning."

"News," Azuyia asked. She turned the envelope over and frowned at the lilac seal the size of two septims.

"Aw, dad's still having me run courier around here," he said with a little annoyance as Ryvanni snorted through her cup, "friggin who woulda thought Falkreath bearskin would be so popular in Pompa Concorda!"

The ensuing banter between Wystan and Ryvanni drowned in the buzz between Azuyia's temples. She lifted the galleon motif of House Cybo.


	4. Chapter 4

The guys had sloughed off to go fishing. Azuyia was finishing her biscuits and tea when Yaliu sashayed down the stairs in her strings.

"Mara ... Yollie! Put some damn clothes on! What if they were here?"

Yaliu polished her knuckles and grinned at Azuyia.

"And no, I do not want to hear about it! These are my friends here."

"What has gotten into you, sis," Yaliu asked at the fingernails she had painted silver, "you're even more fun than your usual _fun_ self."

Azuyia's face puffed slightly, and her hand tightened around her cup.

"Why ... do you always ... have ... to do this," she asked.

"What, enjoy myself," her sister replied with an arched eyebrow.

"You know what I mean. Even back home you're … ugh! Famous."

"Sis," Yaliu pulled her hair on top of her head with both hands, "I have been places you haven't, believe it or not. It's true. I've spent a lot of time in Cyrodiil."

"Your point?"

She let her hair fall and put her hands on the table and drummed her fingers. "They have this story there, part of the myths of their divines ... "

Azuyia interrupted her sharply. "Keep your voice _down!_ There are Stormcloaks in this town just as well as Imperials!"

Yaliu's face lost a touch of its hauteur, and yet she still beamed and continued in a soft tone, "Anyway, they tell this story of the three divines and the miller's boy. Ever heard it?"

"Not even at the Southall Collegium," Azuyia shot back directly.

Her sister's eyes narrowed, lips pushed out. "Well, see, this simple country lad stumbles across a crown buried in the earth, one First Seed when they were breaking soil, and he's mystified. What's a golden crown doing out here in the sticks? So he walks down to the picturesque brook under an iconic sky, and no sooner does he pause there when _poof!_ Three divines are standing right in front of him."

"What do these theatrics have to do with anything, hm?"

"Oh, I'll get to it, dear." They sat there a moment in silence, Yaliu enjoying her end of the table as Azuyia continued to stew. "So the miller's boy sees Julianos, Mara, and Dibella."

"This is stupid, Yoll."

"And they each want the crown." At this, Azuyia's gaze got a bit more intent after rolling eyes and steaming. "The miller's boy, terrified, knowing he'll probably die anyway, decides to play dice with it, what'th'hay. 'Julianos, lord of logic, sure I thank you,' he says, 'if I were to give it to you, what might I ask in return?' Have they ever taught you this one at your ... collegium, Zu?"

"No, they haven't. We work with real forces and use our real energy, and not staring off at the stars waiting for a visitation by some folk wisdom."

"That's what you need to learn. So Julianos says, 'That's a good lad. You give it to me, I'll make you the most powerful man on earth. Weapons, armies, land, gold. Whatever you want, it's yours.' And to this the lad thinks, s _chwiing, cha-ching_ , toys and more toys. Then he turns to Mara, the goddess of luuuve and feewings," Yaliu got a crafty look in her eyes, "and says, 'Good Mara, would you look out for me if I gave it to you?' To that the kind lady says, 'Wise boy. Gets a little lonely in that crystal castle with your toys all by yourself, hmm? You give it to me, I will match you with your perfect mate for a long and happy marriage.'"

Azuyia had started to smile sourly. "I think I see where this is going."

"Ah," Yaliu replied, "and so _our hero, our hero_ turns to the third divine, Dibel-la," she giggled, "and says, 'Hi, Dibbie.'"

"Oh, gimme a ..."

"And she waves her hand and says, 'Shut up. Like Jules here says, whatever you want, it's yours.'"

"I assume this tawdry version of the primaries excuses your behavior? I mean, that what you tell yourself, that you are touched by Dibella?"

"No, sis," Yaliu said, "but I haven't been touched by Mara, either, unlike someone else I could mention."

Azuyia reddened.


	5. Chapter 5

Wystan came to the end of the winding crypt corridors with Gunnar's voice at his back, the torchlight directing him through catacombs sometimes narrow enough to brush both of his shoulders.

"Here we are," the illusionist said matter-of-factly as they stepped down a final shallow set of stairs at the end of the tunnel, another ancient wall of seeping rock with a waist-high alcove. The opening had a neatly rounded upper edge decorated with symbols outside of Wystan's knowledge.

"Hello, what?"

"We're here, kid."

Wystan could not place the feeling as he fixed his eyes on the alcove, not exactly foreboding at the remains of the long dead. Those he had seen for the first time long before today. As a boy Wystan had egged his father into letting him visit the dead halls and open monuments, typical romanticized stuff a lot of folk get themselves into when the skull and bones excite firelight stories and a party. The dry remains in front of him exacted a different queasiness than a timid first shiver at the grisly connotations or peering into an eldritch past. The skull and few pieces of bone, and not even a complete skeleton, had no ceremonial order, no offerings, no precious bits. Aside from the carvings above the alcove, you would not have differentiated this sight from a grave without a marker, just another anonymous ossuary in a Reach field that farmers were still uncovering thirty years after the war.

"Um ... and?"

Gunnar continued holding the torch near the opening and smiled broadly without turning his head. "Not what you were expecting, hm?"

Wystan exhaled through his nostrils involuntarily and gestured off with a hand. "Ah, no.

What _is_ this, Gun?" His tutor had had him forget the adeptus formalities the moment they first met and shook hands.

"The ghost of The Reach, what you asked to see. That," he tipped the flaming end slightly towards the alcove, "is the ghost."

"You gotta be kidding," Wystan almost laughed, tempering himself slightly as he remembered where they were standing. "This?! What," he pointed back and forth at the inscriptions above the arch, "does all that mean?"

Gunnar chuckled slightly in his basso profundo.

"Well?! Why this one? We musta walked, what, half a mile?"

"You are right. This is indeed the very back-back end of the line, the furthest one could walk in here."

Wystan exhaled fully and crossed his arms, stared at his feet.

"They are pre-Third Era ideographics, Reachman work."

"Forsworn Witchmen?"

"That's how they've come to be known. And exactly why this tomb works so well," Gunnar explained, the smile disappearing.

"I seriously don't get this. _Works_ , you say? Aren't we treading on some tribal grounds here?"

"Oh no," Gunnar replied, "these graves are far older than the Markarth fight. It's not the mountain tribes you'd worry about around here; they don't keep written inventories like the Imperials. Besides, heh, like I say this is a different era. More important to the local mainstream than any crazy briarheart."

"Ohhhkeeeyyyyy," Wystan followed, "so what does this gone pile of bones mean?"

The smile returned. "Everything is an illusion. C'mon," the older man turned to go, "seen enough? We've got plenty of walking to discuss it."

They wended through the same set of tight passages lined with as many as three levels of mummified remains, some complete skeletons laid bare. Wystan distracted himself from the blackly stale air by counting the dusty bits of metal here and there in the burial openings, on and around the shrouded remains.

"So tell me," he continued, nervously going through the silent calm he used before tough recitations at the Collegium.

"Eh?" Gunnar continued walking second to Wystan's great delight. It was dead quiet in the cryptways, but that didn't dull his imagination.

"What did you mean about this tomb _working_? Is all of this an illusion?"

"Oh no. The walls, the floors, the bones— all material reality. I've cast nothing."

Wystan stopped and turned around, held out his hand to stop Gunnar's torch.

"Hm," the illusionist's eyes widened a bit. "Yes?"

"Has someone _else_ ... or some _thing_ else ... cast something here? Like six or seven hundred years ago, or more?"

"Now you're asking the questions. The answer," Gunnar paused, grinning at Wystan and looking him in the eye.

"Yes?!"

"If there is any of that craft at work here, it's beyond me or too old to worry."

They continued back out. When they walked up a gentle incline of stone steps into the small round room just inside of the crypt's entrance doors, Wystan stopped and looked back around the antechamber's bas reliefs dancing in Gunnar's torchlight. Stylized dragon heads reached out of the walls, symbolic processions, one-point expressionless faces.

"This," Wystan motioned at the walls, "that," he continued pointing down the stairs where they had emerged, "are all, ah, material. They exist as material."

"Yes."

He managed to meet Gunnar's gaze. "And that ... last grave? That, and I would guess much in this place, are much older than Stormcloaks and legions."

"Right again," Gunnar stood with the torch held out to one side, relaxed. He was not smiling, and then also not giving his student the imperious treatment, looked curious at Wystan's next statement.

"And you say this place for some reason _works_ , that's how you put it."

"Yep. And what do you think I mean by that? What do you _really_ see here?"

"A generic old catacombs of no major repute from which you seem to not sense any interplanar flimflam."

Gunnar chuckled.

"The end of which holds a nondescript pile of bones under a Reachman carving and then not the slightest bit important to a briarheart war chief. But it _works_. Works ... how?"

"C'mon," Gunnar walked toward the doors, "gimme a hand with these." They each leaned a shoulder against one of the double doors and pushed with their full weight. It had required hours to get the encrusted iron open from the other side, first with shovels at the bases of each door and a pickaxe up and down the lichens in between the inner edges, then a campfire for a full pot of steaming oil for the seams and hinges, more scraping with knife ends and one busted dagger point. Gunnar told Wystan that this would have to be the only time they would be able to do this, starting at dawn, and that they would probably be alright since the overgrown path up a series of hills was generally untraveled, superstition keeping most others out anyway. Still and though, he had continued, they would need to take a brief tour, leave nothing behind, and push the earth back against the doors.

"As far as I've researched, on the down low, that is merely an ancestral chamber for notables of the late-Second and early-Third Eras. I'm not for graverobbing," Gunnar strolled at a pace Wystan found irritatingly between his own amble and double-time, a brisk peripatetic from years of walking tours, "not without a definite material target, that is," he smirked through the churchwarden pipe trailing a sweet mixture in the blustery Reach afternoon. "And a buyer outside of the hold. _Never_ go selling this era it's own patrimony if you value your head."

Wystan sipped at a bottle of Alto and wondered how long the walk back into town would take.

"So you're probably wondering why I took you on a sixteen-mile walk and down into a grave, huh?"

Gunnar's voice got a little further off, and Wystan hurried down to the somewhat bemused teacher standing with one elbow in his hand, taking draws of smoke.

"Hem, sorry boss, had to pass. What was that?"

Smoke blew in his direction, dissipated. "Would you like a nap? Tired?"

"Naw, naw Gun. Just needed to stop."

Gunnar gently moved the pipe away from his lips, watched his student take a raffish swig off the bottle, shrug his shoulders.

"Well good, son. Now you. Why did I take you on a walk with shovels?"

Wystan smiled through the roll on his back of two shovels, iron pot with camp frame, field knives, a broken dagger, water skins, and (blessedly now empty) oil pots: "Something ... about that grave works magicka outside here."

"Hah!" Gunnar continued smoking and resumed his stroll.

Wystan drowned a grumble in more wine. They were at the last hill up the road from Varness when the sun was just going down over the horizon, and a hot tavern pie was sounding pretty good right about now, as was a bench to sit.

"Before we get some grub," Gunnar said, after a long walk back in silence, "you will need to stow the tools. Don't need folk getting ideas about us."

"Right," Wystan answered through his feet and aching abdomen.

"Remember," the other continued pulling his characteristic gaze on the village without turning his head, "our cover, too."

"Magelet-needs-an-ore-magnet, got it."

At this, the older man did turn his head. " _Our_ cover, novus," Gunnar used the term for the first time, "and why am _I_ out showing you how to find silver?"

Wystan forgot his bladder momentarily. "Um, yeah, because you're contracted with the jarl to search out new veins and I am your new charge."

"And?"

"And, since we know the arts, at least some, we monitor the area."

"That's right. We're here to _help_. Anyone saw us up there," Gunnar turned and pointed gruffly, "we were just making rounds, got it? Just be your usual self, and so will I." He blew out a hearty laugh. "Meet you at the Argentheim for beers."

An hour later, Wystan had his feet propped up on the opposite bench under the table and leaned against the tavern wall, poured another tankard of lager. Gunnar sat likewise right next to him and smoked, raised a hand every now and then to miners still dusty from work as they came in from the cold.

"Here there, wizo," came a raspy bark or two as the evening turned lively.

"Whatsup, Brenna?!"

For a dirtfloored inn, they could eat much and heartily for a half septim. The central pit had barons of mutton and venison smoking and dripping into the fire, hogsheads behind the bar sat piled with Alikir and Cyrodiilic glass bottles, bags and baskets of vegetables stuffed in every cranny not reserved for a table and chairs. A deep hearth framed with rough Reach granite sat in the wall opposite their bench, iron frames with open iron pots of stews simmered. The Silverhill, Gunnar had translated for him that first night, got its name from some linguistic admixture passed down from generations of multinational laborers in the Reach for the mines, dangerous work that often broke open places sealed deep. There had been readings and lectures at the Collegium about _draugr_ ghouls, even one required symposium that kept them up until two hours before chores; Gunnar smugly added, hearing this, it was probably good old-fashioned metabolic manipulation at work there or, to put it plainly, fatigue used to emphasize the point. _Akatosh, and they did it on a Frostfall night? Perfect!_

The speaker had been Master Eadgar, the alchemist who saved Zia'ro, and had been held in the conjuration vestibule. I say "speaker" in the loosest possible way. He merely walked in to the candlelit chamber [drawing another laugh from Gunnar] and began the spell. Several shushes from the magistra and adepta, and the entire class watched as smoky light enveloped his hands and arms up to the shoulders, a loud _whoosh!_ and there across the thaumaturgic circle stood the growling form of a mummified form in remnant field plate, a museum piece battle axe on its back. It had circles of radiant blue in its eye sockets and looked like a skeleton with a stretched covering of skin. Mistress Tatiana herself got up quickly from her chair at the side of the circle, held her hands up, and lowered them palms down as the exclamations and gasps got louder. Raynu and Juo stood between the benches of novices, many of whom had risen, some making evil-ward signs particular to their kindred. Master Eadgar kept both of his glowing arms up with palms facing forward.

"This," he declamed, "is a draugr." With the last word, the thing balled its fists and let out a guttural sound neither human nor animal, stood rooted to its spot.

"Knut of Valthume," Tatiana called out over the entire room, "he was born in the southern Reach mountains during the first century of the First era."

Ulia had been lounging on the benches at the back of the novices when Eadgar began. At this point, she stood and waved her arms over the rising noise of thirty-six astonished and terrified students, tried to keep her eyes on theirs to avoid looking at the apparition.

The domina nodded at Eadgar, and with a final gesture the draugr vanished. Novice chatter continued to get louder.

"Please ... please! Please," Tatiana walked over to the benches, "everyone, please! Listen. Thank you, Master Eadgar."

The alchemist walked over to a wash basin and towl on the preparation table with the thaumaturgic pigments, slowly rinsed his hands without looking up.

"Knut was one of the last ancient Nords to serve the dragons, that is, he served the dragon priests under the serpents themselves."

"Mistress," Ylena waved her hand up high."

"Not now," Juo snapped at her.

" _What is it, nova_ ," Tatiana asked with a cold stare, and getting no response continued, "Master Eadgar has just shown you several important aspects of the crafts you must never abuse. _Ever_. One," she struck her full oratory, "you must know the conjuration chant by heart, know its entire history. You must be able to scribe the spell from memory! Never _ever_ use a text you do not know that well!"

Complete silence.

"For if you do not," she thundered, "you might call up something like _him!_ An undying warrior serving the oldest powers on earth! DO YOU UNDERSTAND!" Her voice rang for the long, oddly relaxed silence. The novices mostly slumped in their benches since the spell had ceased.

"Two," Tatiana continued in her more even, stately voice, "you have to be strong enough to control that which you call, regardless. A wolf, a bear," she mimed Eadgar's actions, "a large _elk_ for that matter. You don't know what you're doing, you get a hoof to the face, right? These are wild animals."

Most of the seated novices nodded their heads immediately.

"Then, people," she said, "just ask yourself why you need to conjure in the first place. This was a lesson in ancestry. I wanted you to see with your own eyes, which leads me to my final point: stay the _hell_ out of burial grounds unless you have prior knowledge of their layout and provenance. I'm not going to tell you never, just don't go fooling with necromancy absent a purpose." Tatiana glared at Ylena who, to the great pleasure of her proper Cyrodiilic parentage, had since her majority sported a face full of kohl marks and the chic tribal necklaces hawked in the arcade districts, beads and central amulet purportedly from human sacrifice.

"What do you think of this demonstration, master Saltersson," the domina asked while speaking to the center of the benches.

"Domina," the stupefied Eastmarcher managed to ask.

"I said," she turned her eyes to his through the partial light, "what are your thoughts?"

"Haha, so they treated you to a candlelight Frostfall festival," Gunnar grinned, "good one."

"It wasn't fun, man," Wystan retorted mildly, "scared the shyte outta _me_ , that's for sure."

"As it bloody well should. Now you know the reason why that tomb works its magic here in town."

"I guess."

"Oh, c'mon! You still don't see it?"

"Funny, 'see it,' heh. And no."

Gunnar sipped at his tankard. "Think: tomb up there, unknown glyphs, draugr, legends."

"I get it," Wystan said, tiredly, "they think, here, there's one up there in the tunnels, there."

"More. What did you see there at the end of the last tunnel?"

"Zenithar, man, I saw some bones on a shelf. Finito, that's it."

"Precisely."

"What part of the puzzle do I not have?"

"The legend they tell around Fjallness lands about those bones, the bones nobody has actually seen in centuries. That much I know."

"Okay, I'm game, tell me."

"Short version, a scary monster lives in those tunnels and it has followers doing bad things in these parts of The Reach," Gunnar grinned from beneath a finger rubbing his upper lip, trying not to laugh, "like I said, to my knowledge not a lick of magicka burns in that place, not in a very long time."

Wystan was starting to feel the plate of mutton in sage gravy and that last flagon of seasonal bock, yawned. "Uuukaay, so they believe it so, and it is so, royt?"

"Precisely," Gunnar leaned in close and whispered, "nothing is best hidden in ultimate mystery. It's a false relic. No power whatsoever beyond the illusions people already have. Never forget that," he put more in his pipe and leaned back, "learn how to identify _those_ situations before you start casting. Makes your craft all the more powerful."

4E 200 Rain's Hand 01 later at breakfast

Azuyia stopped with a fork of potatoes almost in her mouth, letting the fork slide back down on her plate. The adepta had walked by.

"Something the matter," Wystan Glaedwin asked. He had been one of those immediately next to her at roll call after the acceptances that morning. The son of import-export merchants from the eastern side of Falkreath hold bordering on the Pale, Wystan was longing for something more than another generation of interminable tent greetings and warehouse inventories, so he had taken advantage of a guild childhood traveling abroad in Tamriel with his father. In Hammerfell and High Rock, even the Imperial City itself, Wystan begged and conned his way into this or that arcane workshop and scribendum, and while not professing any real skill at the commons quite yet had at least acquired the knowledge to ask a few questions, and where to ask them.

"Um," the Bosmer said spacily as she watched the imposing, robed figure wend around the refectory, saying nothing and looking at nothing scrutable, "nooooooo ... "

4E 200 later in Rain's Hand

"Come in," Azuyia heard the adepta's voice call out from behind the door after she knocked that evening. She took a breath and walked inside.

"Hello, Azuyia," Juo said, motioning to a chair at the converation table. The change was even more dramatic up close. The Nord girl she had seen just six years ago only vaguely emanated from the face she saw speaking those words in a slightly deeper voice. She had her reddish-brown hair in a tight weave pulled back in braids from her hairline. Juo wore no cosmetics, and her skin had taken on the weatherstained patina one might see in a hunter or caravaneer. She had tiny, ornate dots of silver metal seemingly embedded in her face above each eyebrow, several to a side, and a shiny emerald tattooing from below her nose and winding around her lips, spreading across her chin and fanning out on her neck. The Nord tomboy Azuyia had watched grow from infancy to her social arrival now wore longsleeved expert's robes of worn, yet obviously rich and sturdy cerulean that covered all but the last bit of her burgundy chamois boots. Juo also had an ovoid pearl the size of a quail's egg dangling from a gold chain in each earlobe, and an emerald centered in a gold brooch at the high neck of her vestment. With the journey from Greenheart and all the happenings of the past few weeks, Azuyia had the urge to run over and hug her old friend. Actually sitting across from the new adepta at her private table changed that.

"Juo," she still could not help but smile broadly, "it's so good to see you again. You look great! Ha, I still remember that time you cast a voyance to get at mom's Frostfall candies," she laughed, "you were nine!"

The startlingly changed childhood friend smiled a bit.

"When I saw you coming and going during candidacy, I thought it best that I appear only at acceptances."

"But Ob ... I mean, Adepta, why?"

Juo rose and walked to the other side of the chamber. It was more expansive than the magistra's private quarters only enough to allow a private wash tub with an extra dressing table and stool. She picked up an apricot-glazed ceramic teapot the type you'd find passing through on merchant's carts on any market day, poured two hot measures into pewter beakers, and brought them over to sit back down.

"Listen, and just this once, Azuyia. The moment we walk back out that door, or should I say you do, we have to put aside our memories from Greenheart and focus on here, now. From here on out I am the adepta in charge of overseeing, along with Mistress Tatiana, that Winterhold's laws are obeyed. Wait," she stopped and smiled warmly with the tea at her lips, setting the cup down a moment on the table with her hand around it lightly, "that came out wrong. Winterhold doesn't make laws. That's between them and the Nords," her smile disappeared, "and the Empire. We just want to make sure that _all_ politics of jurisprudence stay out of the Collegium."

"I don't understand ... Adepta," Azuyia said, looking a bit crestfallen at her tea. She felt a hand touch hers ever so slightly.

"Like I say ... just this once. No, it's not the law. That was a mispronunciation," it rolled off her tongue effortlessly, "what I mean is the relationship between Winterhold and the imperial University. We can't give any of those fops reason to come snooping around, or worse set Mede's dogs running up this direction." The lack of a formal address for majesty startled Azuyia a bit, given the domina was herself an Imperial and enrolled by the gens Mede, but she said nothing at her first bit on the inside. "So that's the reason for such as our decorum creed. We don't want any foolish business or trouble with local Nords."

"What does this have to do with with me, Adepta," Azuyia asked quietly.

Juo sipped a little more tea and leaned back in her chair to sit with the beaker in her lap. "Do you think I could fly up to the Hall of the Elements and ask a favor of the archmage, or rather, do you think they dole out favors to friends and compatriots?"

"I'm not asking," the Bosmer started to say, feeling a chill in the air.

"I didn't think you were," Juo interrupted, "and I seriously don't think you will. We simply need to have an understanding, nova."

The moment had come.

" _Intelligis forstand_ , Adepta," Azuyia gave the international double usage, "Will that be all?"

"Yes, Azuyia. I look forward to your progress."

Azuyia and Wystan were walking to the commons one evening when they passed the open door of the infirmary and started at the anguished figure of another novice, gripping herself in fetal position on a surgery table. A man stood there with Raynu next to the shaking Zia'ro, a Khajiit, the so-called "cat people" from an arid province like the Alik'r desert of the Redguards. She held her clawed hands, if you will, to her stomach (Khajiit being a little put off by the Nordic for "paw" as if they were felix domesticus on two feet).

"I don't kn ... yes?" Raynu looked at them from across the room.

"Excuse us, magistra," Wystan said and made to continue down the hallway.

"No, no ... please. Join us," she motioned for them to come in.

He and Azuyia walked over to Raynu and the middle-aged Nord man in bleached work frock and pants.

"This," the adept indicated the suffering Zia'ro, "is why we have our botanical halls." Those were the endless trays, shelves, glass jars, shelves of illuminated books on the minutiae of the world's plants.

"Yes, well, I think this will do it," the balding man in the white worker's clothes said to Raynu. "It's a strong emetic. Minerals from Solstheim. It will ... bring up that mess, so get a chamber pot and basin of water, and plenty of warm, clean cloth. She should recover if you make sure she drinks plenty of fluids. Try some apple-cabbage soup with sage if she can hold it down, and boil some winter wheat with blisterwort, cut it one part wine to three parts tea."

"Thank you, Master Eadgar. The centuriana will see to your payment." When he left, Raynu turned to Wystan and Azuyia. "Could one of you go fetch Gwenfir and Hons from the kitchen, and tell them we need help for a few hours?"

"I'll go get them," Wystan volunteered.

"And tell Hons," Raynu called out as he walked out the door, "to wash the soot off his hands, will you. He leaves fingerprints all over the place." She sat down next to the trembling Khajiit, who had been panting the entire time.

"What happened, magistra?"

"In a minute, nova _._ " Shortly a young Breton woman and Nord man appeared and walked in. They both wore dirty linen aprons over work tunics.

"For Mara's sake, take those dingy rags off, you two," Raynu said disdainfully, "And did you scrub your hands as asked?"

"Yes, ma'am," the redhaired Gwenfir responded, showing her palms. She had clear skin the color of snowfall, ice-blue eyes, and a touseled shock of the fire blonde. _So she's the one those comments have been about at breakfast_ , Azuyia thought. _I'm surprised magistra tightbreeches hasn't had her replaced 'for decorum's sake,' heh._

"Ma'am," Hons followed. He was at least six-five, had bronze skin with traditional High Rock markings in silver-blue ink, a bit of a lantern jaw _. Ah_ , the Bosmer noted again, _the reason why that blessed Vinia has been walking in after four in the morning._

"Let's leave them to attend to her," Raynu said, rising, and Azuyia followed her out into the hallway. The adept shut the door, kept her hand on the door handle. "She ate an _amanita phalloides_ thinking it was a fly amanita. If they don't get the toxins out of her completely, fast, she'll look like she's recovered. Then a day or so later will lay there like that as her liver eats itself, and she will die."

"Magistra!"

"Yes, child."

"Will those medicines help Zia'ro?"

"I put my trust in Master Eadgar. He's the best alchemist I could get at this short notice, and he's lived in the hold all his life. If anyone knows how to treat a mycological poison, it's him."

"Amanita phal- _oy_ -days?"

"Yes. It translates to 'death cap.' I hope you don't forget what you just saw, nova. And don't," she added regally, walking away without stopping to turn around, "feel the need to keep it a secret from your fellows, either."

Over the next week or so, Azuyia made an excuse or two to sit next to the charismatic Khajiit. Many from the human populations of Tamriel took half their lives to get used to the caravans from Elsweyr. The _cats_ , to use the pejorative, although uncommon and seen in small groups were a formidable sight up close. They tended to stand about the height of an average Nord, and while not cutting a particularly bulky silhouette were known by physicians to be noticeably heavier. Not that a Khajiit relied on the wallop that denser bones and flesh might give a barroom haymaker; at the end of their fingers were two- or three-inch claws capable of ripping pieces out of a plaster wall. Their visages ranged from feline shorthairs, common to females, to lambchopped lynxes in many of the males.

They could also jump like their animal lookalikes. Watch a house cat pounce from the floor to the top of a bookshelf and you get a sense of the acrobatic capability of a six-foot Khajiit. Luckily, they were not generally a violent race. Many Nords grew up with habitual distrust of the feline immigrants to Skyrim because they had the reputation as natural thieves and dishonest merchants. Whether the Khajiit stole in greater percentages than anyone else would take Imperial police work on the scale of the Penitus Oculatus, or the Thalmor, but it was well known the caravaneers could sell burlap to an Altmer couturier, and they could see in the dark. Nords had also learned that unarmed single combat with a Khajiit was suicide, so some of the nationalism was just pure instinct.

Zia'ro was well-liked in company. Having grown up in the trade caravans that took her people from the Elsweyr stretches of sand and sparse greenery, thousands of miles north through Cyrodiil to the frozen mountains of Skyrim, she was one of the most traveled in the novitiate and could easily adapt to the variety of conversational manners in a menagerie of folkways. She and Azuyia had not become fast friends by any means, and yet the Bosmer felt as at ease speaking to her as with any of the rest.

"How're you feeling, Z," Azuyia said to her, as others had taken to calling her.

"Moosh bettahh," the dry, unmistakably Khajiit voice replied. "Doze bittah sands zey give dis one help her heal. Dis one remembahh za name of zat plant, yes?"

Hugging and cuddling not exactly a custom with her people, Azuyia had observed in her other interactions, she settled on rapping a knuckle on the refectory table and raising a tankard with her other hand.

"Good health and good fortune," she took a swig to seal the toast.

"Manny thannks, Zooyah."

Zia'ro, to the relief of all concerned, had recovered fully after that painful night of treatment and two days off from study to rehydrate and get her digestion working. Word got around discreetly per Azuyia and her relating the story to both Wystan and Denthryd, and the mycology collection was both more popularly discussed and more intensely studied in hours outside of lecture hall the next few weeks.


	6. Chapter 6

After morning chores one Tirdas, Wystan sat down next to Azuyia with a loaded plate and a thin glass bottle of orange-red liquid along with his ale. They were served additions to the usual potatoes and eggs with biscuits and gravy, a shipment of seasonal smoked meats and cheeses in from foreign dealers, so the repast was lively.

"Looka what I bought off that charcuter from Cyrodiil, Zu! Holstrom pepper sauce all the way from the rain forests."

Azuyia grumbled and poked at her plate.

Oh man ... this is gonna be good!" He twisted the pewter stopper on the pale green bottle of Imperial blown glass, held it over his potatoes and drizzled lines of the reddish-orange liquid. He loaded a fork and ate.

"WhOOOOAAAAHHH!"

Novices sitting next to him actually stopped their conversations a moment, watching him wave his hand in front of his mouth as he managed to swallow the forkful, then down an entire tankard of ale in one gulp. Wystan's face lit up, and he looked like he was breaking a sweat even in the Sun's Dawn wind off the fields.

"Starting early, Wys," the genial Leofric quipped. He was on his way to building a comedy legend there at Southall ever since he had actually gotten the magistra to laugh at one of his stand-up supper jokes. On the stout side and mammoth skinned to the timeworn comments at his expense, the butcher's son from Rorikstead routinely had the entire refectory in tears at his vulgar stories delivered oratorically as he stood on one of the tables. Many had told him he ought to moonlight in one of the capital mead halls or seriously consider bardic lore.

"Mmgruf that's fkn hot," Wys managed to cough.

"And he shook hannnnnnnnnnnnnnds ... with the sheriff!"

Leofric laughed and returned to his scandalous lampoon of a thinly disguised jarl and his Dunmer bed warmer. Raynu stood at the back wall of the refectory with one hand to her mouth. Among the thirty-six present one or two knew of the royal figure behind his monologue, exchanging nervous glances a moment, then busting out laughing along with the rest. Raynu glanced inside the door to the collegium once, then resumed her somewhat straightfaced posture.

"Oh, grow up," Azuyia grumped as the tenor rose to an uproar when Leofric stood on the table and acted out certain portions of his story.

"Morning too, there, sunshine," Wystan blinked his tearing eyes. "What's eating you," he asked, flipping her untouched plate up slightly.

"Got woken up again," she glared down the table at Lavinia Cybo chattering at several female novices with perfect smiles amidst the din.

Vinia was that breed of Imperial who did not necessarily stand out from the crowd and yet established herself early on in the novitiate as the one to beat. She was around five-nine and wore her tawny long hair in a silver ring with moonstone inlays, not exclusively among the novices took the time to apply carmine and garnet dust, and had somehow acquired her novice robes at least a size tighter than usual. Vinia had that type of round face that screamed health and energy. Quite a few novices of both sexes vied for her attention, and just as many despised her for one reason or the other. Azuyia had no opinion of her personally, and did not give a hoot about the gossip. It was the way she had answered at a bench in commons, one day, that had set Azuyia's mind in motion.

"It's just that, Vinia, the other day I was up for a seven-hour stretch at the grounds. I've been at the _codices ignes_ all week. Could you …" she had entreated.

"What, sweetie," her dorm mate asked .

"Keep it down a bit when you come in," Azuyia whispered, "I mean, you and Ylena have been talking pretty loud at night."

Vinia kept smiling, and ran both of her hands down her long ponytail after tightening the ring, arching her back and holding the pose.

"Oh, we do have fun," she yawned and stretched her arms above her head, keeping them there a moment.

"Yes, Vinia," Azuyia persisted, directly annoyed that she was not turning to engage her. "Great. And between your flopping your entire body down a couple hours before chores, and her carrying on at your stories I am losing two or three hours of sleep! D'ya mind?!"

Azuyia had learned that Vinia came from a well-to-do family of peripheral courtiers living on the coast of the inland sea surrounding the island of Imperial City. Her father Marius had been the first generation of their family line to acquire a surname on the Imperial register, _Cybo_ having formerly been just his family shingle outside the warehouse doors for his shipping business in Anvil on the southern coast of Cyrodiil, stylized from the commonplace _cybaea_ for a merchantman. To the ancient families on the Imperial City riviera this new name had elicited a few laughs in the salons twenty years prior, but nobody was turning down invitations to lay on his peach Akaviri silk couches and eat Daggerfall oysters off gilded cloisonné. The family business had been awarded guild status by Titus Mede's censors, recognition of the Cybo ships that had aided in materiel and troop transport along the coasts of Hammerfell, Cyrodiil, and Valenwood during the Altmer invasions from Summerset Isle in the early 170s. In less than a decade Marius had built an international network of warehouses and financed a sizeable fleet, and had moved his growing family to a not inconsiderable villa on the riviera. They had arrived, there, a ferry away from the City itself, and thus it was time to announce themselves to the society season. Marius bought a _nomen_ , a name for himself, through the censors who recorded ancestries in the capital temples to the divines. It was whispered that his election to civil tribune had also been acquired with so many gold septims.

Vinia had spent her candidacy from a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Fletchersgate mercantile exchange arranged for her in advance of her trip to Falkreath, and had slept those six hard months on clean cotton sheets shipped in with her trunk of Alik'r and Black Marsh unguents, picked up and dropped off by one of the thane's carriages each day. Presumably fed in the same style, Vinia was one of the more vocal novices on that first full day of nervous indoctrination in the study halls, contributing her opinion to the delight of several who would become her cohort at refectory and commons. It somehow did not surprise Azuyia when she got her response.

"Dear," Vinia replied without turning her head, waving across the commons, "your milkdrinker hiney can deal with it," she then turned her head as she got up to go talk, "I ... am going to live a little." She danced her shoulders and torso, fluttering her hands, turning her head to the side and pursing her lips as if to kiss the air.

"I hear a skooma habit makes it hard to stand still," Azuyia said. For that she got a lethal stare from Vinia, and a silent turn of the back as she walked off.

"Soooo," Wystan coughed one final time before getting up to refill his tankard, "why dontcha do something about it," he said with a wink.

Over the next few weeks Azuyia started to take walks into Fletchersgate on her rest days. She had not been off the Collegium grounds at all since the snow fell, and besides the stir crazies wanted to browse the apothecary's shelves. She had gotten to know Runa, the alchemist, and traded information that she had so far about herbs and roots, listening mostly since the other had grown up in that very shop with her mother and father, who had since retired. It was one of those Sundas afternoons they were sitting around talking when Vinia walked in.

"Afternoon."

Runa got a look and a sniff as the diplomat's daughter breezily handled bottles and bundles of dried plants on the shelves. She called over.

"Hey, could you c'mere a minute," she motioned across the hearth-sized dealer's room.

Runa, having served customers since she was a little girl, graciously stood up. "I see you don't have much in the way of scents."

"We have plenty of lavender and snowberry, take a look," the alchemist indicated the baskets of parchment-wrapped squares and ceramic jars.

"Tsk-tsk, nuu-nuu-nuu," Vinia chortled and shook her head, "not hand lotion. I'm talking Alik'r stormwood. Got any?" She angled her head and narrowed one eye a bit.

Runa answered politely, "Stormwood's pretty rare in these parts, miss. We only carry what travels here regularly, or we can make ourselves. We could ... look into an order, perhaps?"

"Oh, swelll, miss. Add a bottle of Cherrol bronzer to that? Send the chit over to the thane, too, they'll have the payment arranged." With that, Vinia strode back out.

Runa, who had the timeless draw born of a cheerful disposition and the face of the wild steppe, turned around blithely and said to Azuyia, "I ... hate those Imperial _vahies_ ," she spat the outrageous Nordic slang that would have any woman in Skyrim drawing a sharpened blade should anyone use it in her direction. Azuyia laughed, and stayed with her to talk into the evening.

After first lectures and practice on a sweltering day in Sun's Height, Azuyia was hanging out with Denthryd as he had a pipe in the shade. Just then the front door of the Collegium swung open and Vinia groused out followed by their Argonian colleague Aranei-Ta.

"But Vinia, you look great! We must ..," Aranei-Ta, a novice from the western pampas regions of Black Marsh exclaimed at the back of the other who was cursing as she disappeared down the hill towards the stream. In a class of thirty-six just past the halfway mark of this intensely contained program, and that after the previous candidacy, everyone at this point knew something about everyone else. So this new affair puzzled Denthryd in his recreational haze, and he hurried behind the brisk strides of his colleague.

"Hey, Zuyi," he asked when they got inside, "Vinia into scales now?"

"Nuupe," Azuyia chuckled and held his hand, hurrying him around several bends in the Collegium corridors, looking for Wystan. Finding him with another of his winsome study partners, she motioned him up excitedly and indicated that he should follow. She led the other two to a short padded bench set into wainscoted walls outside an extra meeting chamber in a side nook down one of the passages. Checking to see that it was locked and peeking into the darkness of the crack below the door, Azuyia stood up and motioned them to sit. Putting her hands on their shoulders, she cracked up and quietly told them how she and Runa had had Vinia's order intercepted at the Cyrodiil border.

"She knows someone who knows someone in the Falkreath customs house. Sent an alternate order to Black Marsh and had them switched, then stamped at the Skyrim border and received in Fletchersgate pro forma."

"You gotta be joking," Denthryd shook his head, grinning. Wystan was hysterical, clapping and kicking his feet.

"Nuupe. Put essence from an Argonian female into every one of her lotions and creams, oh! Worked out a deal with Lef to drip it all over poor Nei-nei's bed. The guy must be stupid, ha, she'll be dancing for him until the 'bronzer' passes out of her system, oh, six months after she figures it out," she busted out laughing. "I saw a copy of the _Argonian Maid_ on her bed when I went back for a minute this morning!"

"Remind me not to cross you, Zuyi," the Eastmarcher chuckled. She got up and gave him a cheeky-cheeky, getting an amused look, and skipped off down the hall.


	7. Chapter 7

4E 200 The magical year begins.

Thus Raynu accepted the job of magistra adept at the sanctioning of Southall. A minor affair on the season by Imperial City standards, the blessings by the Akatosh acolytes, and attendance by Jarl Siddgeir and his Altmer steward Nenya themselves for a moment drew a half-day's influx of curious Falkreath villagers and townsfolk. Not a civil function per se beyond the tax on mundane supplies headed off the path to support college operation, nor a part of the cyclical calendar for Nords, there wasn't a revel or feast, just a boring, crowded occasion and an anticlimactic meeting of four inside the shut front doors.

She had for the previous seasons, then, when not on the bare edge of exhaustion managing thirty-six rowdy novices, had access to the collegium library and antiquities. Most importantly, she had had an expert and a master on site, whatever her misgivings about their respective backgrounds. The years went by fast even for a Bosmer. Six novice classes graduated with a high success rate, ninety-eight percent to be exact. The only ones not making it through were a combination of natural causes like illness and family issues, one or two brassy hardheads who quit in a huff, but mostly a commendable success. Raynu went into all of this knowing there were no awards for pushing students through the system other than her continuing guidance by the best in the country, and avoiding the too-real accidents resulting from incompetent flame instruction did not entail applause.

This first morning of her seventh year turned into one of those, a hectic first day after a vigil herself having been kept up late by her two seniors' long, long conversation. A couple hours of sleep, a run into town to see the hired cooks on their way, checking the cellars and larders against her inventory, the requisitions receipts from meat, cheese, wine, and flour merchants, hundreds of small items and decisions whilst groups of excited youngsters milled around the commons just inside the front doors exclaiming and gossiping. Then she personally handed out and directed the work assignments, made rounds overseeing the morning's chores, took a trip back to the kitchens from the fields (wondering, all the while, what a centuriana from the southern legions was doing other than standing there looking official). Raynu had successfully gotten everyone up and out of bed, into the fields, fed, and was looking forward to a couple hours on the sidelines with a stealthy teacup of brandy while the domina and adepta introduced groups to the study halls.

On one of the informal side tours she had been with the Mistress and seven students who had eagerly pushed to be the first in the conjuration vestibule, a circular room on the far side of the main building down a set of stairs.

"Now here," Tatiana Meda started to say as she herself opened the double doors leading into the room, we have our conj ..." She stopped for the briefest moment, turned gracefully and let out a breath with closed eyes. "Ray- _nu_ ," she said in a quietly firm voice and tossed her right hand up as she walked back up the stairs past seven novices in various states of laughter, shock, and disbelief. As she had opened the doors, they were treated to the sight of two fellow novices in the middle of the floor, and not tracing a thaumaturgic circle with the pigments, mind you. The young woman and young man, both healthy Nords, embarassedly hustled their trousers and shirts back on, pushed boots on feet without footwraps, pulled robes over their heads in the awkward silence punctuated by a few giggles.

Raynu had one of those moments where one asks if this job is really worth the headaches. She still had to contract out on novice rest days to make tinctures, gather herbs for Fletchersgate apothecaries, walk miles sometimes after her normal shift. Southall Collegium was not an Imperial City guild and she was not a recognized tradeswoman moved up from her apprenticeship; the place paid her, besides room and board, in clean laundry and any necessary medicines, all she could drink, and a pittance in gold septims. She was adjunct help in reality, like the cooks hired from the villages, a furnishing for Winterhold's three-mage station there in Falkreath. She quits, and they'd have two hundred adept petitions stream in the door from all over the continent.

She did have her own private room, but it was just a timber-walled space with enough floor to allow a novice's cot, a conversation table with two chairs, an end drawer with ceramic wash basin, and a small wardrobe. Not that she _had_ anything much _in_ it, she had grumbled at the end of this most amusing first day of the 200 class. The expensive Cyrodiilic gowns and ensembles she had imagined having by now were, apiece, often more than she had earned in six years including the rural contract work.

"You! Get your arses down to convocation, now!" She turned to the other seven, "You ... go to commons, I don't give …" The two lovers had pushed redfacedly through the group and were jumping up the steps back to the commons when Raynu called out loudly, "And Domina will be with you shortly." Their pace slowed. She walked in the conjuration room, pushed the doors closed behind her, and collapsed onto the lowest bench there along the wall, leaning her back against the next one and taking a long swig out of the brandy she had concealed in her robe. Raynu was ninety-five years of age, so you might say she was approaching thirty and wondering where her life was going, making her coin chaperoning audiences around the mysteries of magicka, and now she had to go sit in on another tired pre-War custom where lovers get "the talk," and write out two letters of remonstrance. _They don't pay me enough for this_ , she griped silently, getting back on two sore feet and heading out of the room.


	8. Chapter 8

She had been out foraging on the moors east of Fletchersgate on a wonderful day out in the cooling Last Seed air. It had been one of the cubs she saw first.

 _Uh ... oh_ , Azuyia thought.

Sure enough, she turned around and a fifty-stone mother and two more cubs appeared a few paces away. She took a breath and closed her eyes, preparing the animal chant all Bosmer knew, when she felt the breath of the mother bear and the crushing pain through her right side. The bear had taken one swipe at Azuyia and torn through her robes to the collarbone and right shoulder, missing mostly but claws raking deeply enough. She gasped and struggled to focus on the internal signs, and she felt teeth clamp down on her right shoulder immediately. The force of the bear's bite forced her almost on her face. The pain of the bite and racing pulse knocked her wind, interrupted her chant, and it took every discipline to regain concentration.

 _Mother ... sister ... please let me go_ , she called out to the bear from the bottom of her soul.

She fell on her back and the bear stood on its hind legs over her, and let out a roar in front of the cubs.

 _Get ... away ... from my children ... elf_ , she heard the bear's voice in her head.

Azuyia was so confused with pain and heightened senses that she turned around and ran without a thought. The chant was not going to last long. She dashed straight for the closest part of the cart road leading into Fletchersgate. The wound bled badly. She could not make a salve from anything she had collected, not right there in the field, and knew the blood loss could kill her, so she pulled her robe over her head and rolled one arm firmly in her fists. Going to one knee after taking off her tunic, Azuyia pulled the scramasax out of its sheath and started the flame from her palm facing upward, held the blade over the fire as long as she could sustain it. Biting down on the arm of her robe, Azuyia held the smoking blade to her shoulder and closed her eyes through tears as it burned the wound as best as she could concentrate, then let the robe fall from her mouth, falling on her back to breathe. She repeated the process and gasped through tears as the hot metal burned her skin.

Azuyia woke up suddenly from the spot sunken in a hillock where she had wrapped up in her robes and passed out into an agonized sleep. She stood up, stumbled, and it wasn't the bear she heard coming near. She scanned the tops of the tall grass in the moonlight, and that's when she saw another observer from the high moor country that stretched for miles in all directions. It was difficult to see, but she heard its breathing and a low growl.

The wolf had circled off to her right. She could not call out to an animal again until the following day, so this one would not listen to her, and it smelled blood. Smaller summer game were not as plentiful. Azuyia had not seen any rabbits or foxes the entire day.

Azuyia limped along the trade road. The nightmares, wow, the nightmares. _All abandon, all abandon, all abandon_ some weird man in a fur and claw waistwrapping and bloody markings from chest to forehead incanted, kicking feet up in a dance, waving both hands out to his sides while dancing in front of an obscene phosporescent temple face and surrrounded by snakedancing women in animal skull masks chanting something else. She ran to a gathering of vaguely recognizable faces, who? Who? They looked at her, standing there as if waiting for something.

Only a little bit further. Her shoulder ached and buzzed with the pain of ant bites, and stiffness had spread down the right arm. The pain had long since departed that point of wanting to cry or be anxious about what more was coming. Now Azuyia trudged slowly towards Fletchersgate's first guard post with her vision darkening at the edges and ears ringing.

 _Please tell me somebody help me somebody have ..._

Blink. Something ... smells ... freaking GOOD. _Uuuh ugh!_

"Hey, heyyyy ... slowly, child," she heard a voice say in a southern accent and felt a hand press her breastbone. Azuyia blinked. She stared up at a firelit beam ceiling, a woman's face. "Take it slowly. Your body is rrecovering."

"Wha ... whaat?"

"Slowly, here."

She felt a strong hand cover the back of her head, pulling her until she was almost sitting, and then guide her head back down on a raised, firm cushion. The woman sat down next to her, a Nord, probably in her fifties with bobbed sandy hair. She wore a deep blue apron over a worn, brown workday dress with the sleeves pulled up to the elbows, had corded forearms with protruding veins.

"Here, can you rraise your hands?" She held a cup of something out.

Azuyia thought for a moment. _Oh man, c'mon, up!_ She felt the fingers in her hands, moved them, flexing them out stiffly, then pulled them down at the wrists. "Okay ... I'm ... trying. What is this?"

"Bonebreak feverr, and the vorst I've ever seen. Yah're lucky."

The Nord woman got up and put the cup on the stool where she had been sitting, standing with her arms crossed. "The vatch brought you to me three days ago, said you passed out right there on the grround." She walked over to a low table next to a trunk across the room and gestured to a pile of fur draped on the one chair and table. "You had this across yahr shoulders still vet," she said with only a slight smile at the corners of her mouth, "and this," lifting Azuyia's sheathed scramasax in one hand as if it were a table knife, "appears to have been your arrmament for a _volf_ -hunting expedition in that," she pointed at Azuyia, "your, let me guess, night gown?" Now the Nord woman was not smiling, and put the blade back down on the table next to the piled fur. "Mind telling me vat a kid from, vhere? A Vhiterrun potato farm is doing out on the Falkreath moor hunting volves widda a fekking knife?"

Azuyia didn't feel enough blood running through her veins to be much tiffed at this. She could get her forearms across her body enough to shift towards the cup on the stool. Just a minute, maybe a few more. She shifted on to her side and looked at the Nord. She had heard this tone in other Nords ever since she had reached Skyrim. For one, they did not like or trust magic, and so her tone was nothing new. Mind you not all these rocky bounders with the blunt speech and very often even blunter manners went out of their way to even notice a foreign novice.

"I was just," she swallowed drily, "taking a hike from the Colleg..." she almost got out.

"Oh, beautifuul! And you strriplings expect emergency crews vhen you step out for a saunter in the _rreal_ vorld?"

"No ... ma'am ... "

The Nord walked over to the iron soup pot suspended on a rack above the fire, stirred. "Lissten, gehll," she said in what Azuyia found to be a gorgeous Nordic accent, something about the trilling to an otherwise matter-of-fact sound, "the moors may look prretty with all the flowahs and heathah, but they are deadly, full of big game just like that beah you stumbled on, and the volf," she motioned at the pelt on the table. "And cats, did you know that?"

"Yes, I've seen one before."

"Then you know," she continued stirring and added a pinch of something from a jar on the lintel into the pot, "you'd have no chance vatsoeva against one." She put the ladle on a plate, turned towards Azuyia. " _Neverr, everr_ go back out on the moor alun. Ve've lost folk in this village becoose of that, you know?"

You would think it were prudent not to walk around a neighborhood with open handheld flame jetting up a few feet in the air, or scry your way in blinding blue light to the misplaced tundra cotton manifest some shopkeeper paid you a septim to locate across town. If nothing else, it's showing off, and Nords may be blustery people but in Azuyia's encounters with them they also don't much care for braggarts.

For a Bosmer, illness from a wound hit far less often and with less severity than for the humans. It was a genetic adapation, and part of elementary medical knowledge that the peoples of Valenwood had acquired in the densely-forested nation. The sheer variety of plant life the generations of Bosmer lived amongst, consumed, cultivated had given them an immune profile that continued to astonish Nordic physicians. For that reason, many of Azuyia's kind became doctors of one sort or the other, from restoration specialists out of Winterhold to midwives and village alchemists. If a seasonal bug or the dread cyclical plagues raged through any given area, it was the Bosmer withstood sickness the best. Thus, up to this point in her life, she still listened intently to the stories her Nord, Redguard, Breton, and Cyrodiilic colleagues told about that case of influenza that they had had for a week in childhood. Azuyia had rarely experienced much of what most Skyrim humanity accepted as a fact of life, including infection.


	9. Chapter 9

Azuyia stopped to talk with a Dunmer dressed in a traditional Morrowind gown showing her occupation to be a legal scribe, and Wystan plopped himself on a free stool motioning to the barkeep. Denthryd walked over to the fireplace and warmed his hands.

Wystan appeared and clapped him on the shoulder with a wine eye and a laugh.

"Hey, man! Les' go sit down, eh?" He had a green glass bottle and two pewter cups in his other hand.

"Right," Denthryd said dourly. Azuyia had struck up a conversation with the Dunmer, laughing and carrying on across the room. He followed Wystan to a side table against the wall under a display of an old Nord breastplate split in the heart.

"Aw, some tosser from Eastmarch boonies," they both heard from backs turned, guys seated at the long bench next to the central fire in the floor, much guffawing, a belch.

" _Kennt_ ," another voice echoed from the group of men still wearing cheap iron corselets and various low-end helmets.

Wystan read the scene. He saw his friend's blood rising before he had lowered his cup to the table. Oh no, not tonight.

"Den ... _Den_ ," he offered, "walk away. We don't need it."

Denthryd sat still, quaffing at his cup and then filling it to the brim with Alto wine. He raised the brim to his mouth and threw its contents back, stood up to walk down the free space between the wall and the bench where the toughs sat spouting, walking slowly in Azuyia's direction. The laughing and crass jokes continued to the dismay of other patrons and Kirila, the innkeeper, did leave the bar to walk over and say something in a low voice to the nearest guy on the bench. He raised his flagon, gave a what for with his other hand, and continued drinking and laughing.

"Skeevy mage," the muttering continued.

Denthryd turned in the direction of the men on the bench, and both Wystan and Azuyia stood up. He walked directly over to the one who had just belted out, extended his hand, and flipped the guy's helmet clear off his head to fall with a loud thunk to the ground behind him. All five of them stood up.

"You gotta prob, mate," the one asked him.

He and Denthryd were about the same size. The bounder had a full beard and close-shaven head with indigo tattooing around both eyes. Not Legion, just a mercenary at best from the bottom shelf metal.

"Yeah. You," Denthryd said. At this the other laughed with his head back, and his buddies chuckled.

"Oh? And what, prayest thou tell me, fine _sirrah_ , wouldst thou care to do about such, _anon_ ," he mimicked in style of the popular stage dramas.

"Step outside?"

At that the man's face grew a bit more serious. He still had a mocking smirk, arms crossed. "And what shouldst such a pretty boy plan on, then? Wishing me away?"

The other five laughed heartily while the crowd in the tavern was keeping its distance, and patrons were nervously moving their business to tables well away from the scene. Denthryd moved towards the door but then walked directly up to the man, standing with his feet almost touching, drew his right hand out to the side and slapped the other man hard across the cheek. At this, Kirila rushed over.

"Out! Both of you, out! Wanna fight? Outside ... now!"

Denthryd pushed the tavern door. He walked down the steps to the street turned around, and faced the tavern entrance. The bounder and his five were outside in no time. A crowd followed them from the tavern, Azuyia and Wystan trying to get past the initial rush, and others in the street stopped at the obvious beginning of a brawl. The man had replaced his helmet and had a warhammer on his back. Denthryd made no motion, kept his hands by his sides. The crowd formed in a rough semicircle, the space behind him a little clearer due to the proximity of a public well.

"Oh ... kayyy, milkdrinker, what's ... it ... gonna ... beeee?"

The man pulled the warhammer from his back and stood with feet planted wide, knees slightly bent, the head of the weapon down towards the ground to his right, handle raised in his left hand. Denthryd had the wakizashi on his back, and drew it with his left hand to both chuckles and murmurs from the crowd. Then he extended his right hand out in front of him, forearm out with palm up, upper arm loosely against his torso. A bluish-green flame as long as a sword burst upwards from his palm and hovered, appearing just above his skin in a rush. The flames didn't dance like a normal hearth or brazier, more hissing and rushing continually upward. The crowd rustled and the semicircle widened by twofold so that Denthryd and the other man were mostly alone in the street.

Three Fletchersgate guards with lowered visors and carrying Legion pila appeared at equidistant points near them, points lowered at body level.

"Stop!" one yelled. "You are endangering the lives of citizens!" His visor faced Denthryd. "Lower your weapons! Now!"

The other two faced the bounder, and he haughtily relaxed to normal stance, setting the hammer's head on the ground before one guard quickly took it from him and the other hustled him off, pushing his back and swearing. The third guard remained facing Denthryd with his pilum at face level. A squad of XIV Southern milites appeared down the street headed by a bareheaded older man in heavy Imperial armor and wearing a gladius with the purple scabbard inscribed with silver runes. By the time they got to the whispering, wide-eyed crowd, Wystan and Azuyia saw fifteen men, counting the first guard who had since raised his visor to reveal a scarred middle-aged face, who were now taking Denthryd away. The leader walked up to him close enough to speak without any onlooker hearing.

"If you even think about using that between here and the bailey, I will put you in the hog pens and take my chances with the thane. Understand?" Denthryd nodded briefly, and two of the guards grabbed his arms, and he was also hustled off.

Denthryd woke up early. He had spent the night on a straw pile on the floor of the thane's combination courthouse, tax station, jail, and treasury. Of course he had been offered no food or water, and listened to a couple of inebriates from around town howl the night away. He was not in a good mood for starters. Then a civil guard in watch livery carrying a truncheon unlocked the gate to his cell, and profanely ordered him to walk out and up the passageway stairs, turn to the right at one of the bailey's main rooms, stand there, and wait. The door shut, and Denthryd stood and waited in the room. It had excellent appointment for a regional thane's civic building. He recognized the dark, carved wood from pieces he had seen in his few trips into Windhelm, expensive exotica only to be had here by way of Khajiit caravans. It was probably Argonian material, who knows the craft or the make. There was an extravagant desk there with a very high-backed carved wooden chair of the same foreign material with what probably been Imperial crimson leather cushioning worn by time into a light rose tint.

He stood long enough to get bored and want to sit down. So he sat on the hardwood floor, crosslegged, and waited some more. There was a window in the room looking out on the street. It had bars, for sure, but at least the light filtered in. The sun had moved further west. At last, the door made a noise and opened. Two men and a woman walked in. The older of the two men sat in the chair, and the other two stood at either side. Seated was the thane Cenric with Ainn to his right. At his left stood Titus Anvila, _tribunus legionis_ and third in command of the XIV Southern who had won his name as a naval commander in the war against the Thalmor. Not of senatorial family, he nevertheless personally oversaw most of the Southern business along with the _primus pilus_ and other staff.

"Would you mind telling me," Cenric began, "what you think you were doing last night?"

"I ... uh ... " Denthryd said, between tiredness and lack of any story to tell really.

"Yes, that is what I thought," the thane replied, "not thinking at all about what you were doing. Do you realize, young man, that there were children in that crowd? Do you? Forget the damage that magical fire can do this town should it spread, there were children present!"

"I know, sir, and I'm very sorry," Denthryd tried to say.

"Sorry. We tolerate magic because it helps us in the _war_. Because Stormcloaks have it, so we too have it. And that's it. We do not tolerate the reckless usage of dangerous methods in our town squares!"

At this, Ainn spoke. "You have recklessly endangered the lives of men, women, and children in Fletchersgate, and in front of witnesses also drawn a blade on a fellow Nord for uncivil, selfish reasons."

"But ... he had a warhammer! Ma'am!"

"And he is being dealt with as well. You are from Eastmarch, correct?"

"Yes. And I am not a Stormcloak!"

"Nobody is accusing you of treason, son," Anvila said. "You are being charged with the endangerment of Fletchersgate citizenry by the unlawful brandishing of a blade and use of magic."

Denthryd did not know what to say. He absolutely fumed inside at the hauteur, and what he saw as the petty exercise of power. Yet he also knew enough about a fiefdom, having grown up a stone's throw from one of the biggest, oldest ones not to run his mouth in the presence of officials.

They were waiting outside when Denthryd walked out of the bailey at last. He was feeling sour, to say the least, and said nothing as he tried to walk past them. Wystan cleared his throat, and Azuyia grabbed his hand.

"Hey ... Den," she said.

"So what did they give you," Wystan asked, slightly smiling. Denthryd stiffened like he would rush the guy. He was tired and only wanted to go to the tavern, get drunk, and lie down.

"Den," Azuyia pulled him close and whispered in his ear, "he paid your bail, man." He looked at her, and she nodded. "Coulda been a lot longer till today, know?"

He woke up before dawn and had a cup of strong herbs he had brewed the night before, took three tawny seeds procured off the apothecary's special list the previous day with the bitter mixture, you know, the list kept under the counter for customers who know what to ask for? Windhelm being a port city, Denthryd had grown up around a modicum of imported palliatives that folk in his village acquired at the docks, kept in apothecary jars tucked away among summer preserves. He had started with the nets and fish barrels when he was five years old, and so had experienced the gurry sores on his forearms from a long season pulling goods out of salt water. One evening his mother had given him a seed from the plants in Black Marsh to swallow with his tea, a relief in his blood as she rubbed his cracked hands with a mash of flour and elve's ear.

Limbs warming and things receding in the distance of yesterday, he headed out of the tavern and the town's gate, trying not to look at the guards who, while visors lowered, might know something about him. The camp was a full day's wagon ride to the northeast. He stopped in to a grub shack outside the town gates near the stables, just an open pit smoker and fireplace behind a rough table with a four stools.

"Whaddya have," the orc asked. Mak had grown his business around the area by not catering to couriers.

"Steak ... and ale."

Denthryd had a greasy wooden plate of hash browns as well. He hadn't eaten in a day since all the fun began. Farm breakfast tasted great.

He got out of the wagon after a jarring ride and tipped the driver, walked up to the gate of what had until recently been the regional headquarters of an Imperial cavalry regiment, the Fifth Steppe Watch, a medium horse unit people called the Bastards for some reason. During walks with Azuyia and Wystan, some of them had gone riding through the fields on exercises perhaps. They had been wearing cuir bouilli with mail torso, and curiously no headgear of any kind, with short bows strapped to their backs and curved sabers in saddle harness.

The walls and lowered gate, extended over a moat several times the height of a Nord were constructed of completely untreated timber for the most part. Walking closer, he noticed the walls had a sort of mortar made of the native Falkreath soil and rocks, and sod with live grasses growing out of it. Inside the gate there was virtually nothing left that gave any clue of a Legion unit's residence in the area other than seven wooden sheds nearly the length of the walled camp, as wide as four village houses each looked. The green of the pastures outside the gates was gone. In its stead was a trampled expanse of mud around and in front of the sheds. Other than the structures, there were only water troughs here and there like you'd find outside nearly every home and business. A man in Legion livery, the scarlet tunic fitted with leather straps and embellishments that all soldiers wore like a second skin underneath their armor, and light army leather boots and gloves walked up to him from across the stretch of mud in front of the nearest shed.

"G'day, my boy," he said happily, extending his hand. The guy looked about sixty, shaven head, white stubbled face looked like it had seen a few fights. "Name's Kaiain. _Praefectus_ for the Fifth. Been at it forty-three years!"

Denthryd said nothing, stared blankly.

"Got no idea what I jes' said d'ya?"

Denthryd looked at him warily. "You're ... Breton?"

"Thaz royt, lad," Kaiain replied, "all the way from the islands off High Rock, nor' by nor' west. You couldn't get any farther and still call it Tamriel," he smiled and spat in the mud.

Any other time, Denthryd would have been fascinated to talk to this one, but there was the matter at hand.

"Sooooo ..." he asked, "You know you know why I'm here?"

The older man cracked a smile, and took out a hand-sized dull metal flask from the pouch next to the pugio on his frayed Legion _cingulum_ with several stylized iron dragon heads and a patinated bronze Altmer crest punched through it. Years, operations, and the Great War. He swigged from it, and turned toward the door of the first long shed, motioning with the flask hand.

"Let's go."

They walked up the barn doors. There was a tree trunk post right out front of this one with a smooth wooden board fixed to it at eye level with nails. The man walked to the one side of the double doors, motioned to Denthryd to take the other by its wrought iron handle, and they both pulled back with their entire body weight. Once moving the doors were easy to push, and the shed opened up and then let out its telltale fragrance.

 _Oh man_ , he thought with a sinking feeling in his gut, _not this_.

The sheds had been stables. Upon entering the camp, Denthryd had hoped beyond hope that the mud was from the horses' hooves and these temporary wooden buildings were the troops' quarters. Boy, had he been mistaken, exactly the opposite. The army had apparently been in tents out in the elements, and the horses had been in here. _Whew_. He felt a hand clap his left shoulder. Kaiain stood next to him, then, and took more swigs from his flask.

His tone changed to an official drawl.

"You have been assigned to help the fiefdom of Fletchersgate prepare for the turning and sowing next year," he began. "Ever worked on a farm?"

"No," Denthryd sighed, "but there were plenty around in Eastmarch."

"Good, then you know the value of manure," Kaiaian smiled. "We'll need all of this," he gestured towards the stalls and open areas extending the length of several town streets, "in a single pile just inside the main gate."

"What?!"

Kaiain turned to him without a smile, but also with no malice in his demeanour or tone. "You are ... to shovel out ... the stables ... for the farmers to spread in their fields. There," he pointed to a smelter's shovel. "Follow me, we need to talk about other details."

 _Wow_ , Denthryd thought, _more fun_.

As he was estimating the weight of one shovel load and multiplying it by the apparent length of the shed and visible volume of horse dung, and by seven, then the distance of the beginning to the end of the shed out into the yard where Kaiain wanted it all piled, the two walked past the six additional shed fronts and down the camp yard to another medium warehouse at the back corner of the entire facility. Walking up to it, Denthryd saw a couple of heavy timber tables like tanners use to skin a wolf before stretching its hide on the rack and begin scraping. They were also stained like a tanner's station. Kaiain pulled the ring of keys that had been jangling at his cingulum, fiddled through them, and put one large steel key into the lock on the door.

More fun. If the stables had stunk like dung, this place had flies and a rancid cloud of an odor that had him rush back outside, double over, and hurl his potatoes on the ground.

"What the ..." he gasped at Kaiain, steadying himself back up.

"Legion's gotta eat, m'boy. Same as you townies at your steaks and ale."

It had been the slaughterhouse for an entire regiment of horse, and apparently it had not been cleaned out either. Denthryd held his stomach and stepped back inside the building, took a look around from just inside the door. It was also a retching mess, bones piled on the ground, bloody rot covered in maggots, flies everywhere.

"You are to put everything in there," Kaiain said behind him, "into those." Denthryd turned back around and walked outside past Kaiain. He was pointing past the slaughterhouse to a pile of barrels, and walking around back motioned to dozens and dozens of them.

"Talos ... man, why? I can understand the stables, but ... this?"

"Because every bit of that can be used. Bone meal can make fertilizer, alchemists can brew it, I even hear you magic types use it. All that blood, too, fertilizer. Scoop it out, put it in the barrels. I'll have it shipped out in wagons when you are done." Kaiain then started to walk away back towards the camp's main entrance.

"Wait!" Denthryd called at him.

"Yes?"

"Nothing," the novice said dejectedly, having wanted to ask if were to get any help, thinking better of it.

"There will be a scrip on the duty board each morning. I believe you signed your accusation at the bailey already?"

"Yesssss," Denthryd replied.

"Good. The thane knows your sign, then, and will be expecting it each day. _Do_ remember to sign in, man, I'd hate to have to fill out any _additional_ papers about you," the senior man smiled knowingly at him, turned, and walked away.

Our penitent novus lowered himself into one of the troughs of rainwater at the far side of the camp at dusk the following week. He had a bar of Alik'r jasmine and a new horse-grooming brush. His nostrils had lost their sensitivity to the scents, yet others' had not. Azuyia had clued him in to this one. After one humiliating try, the third or fourth day into his chores, at renting a dive room with a washtub in the Fletchersgate flophouse district and getting thrown out at the point of a fishing knife, he had resigned himself to scrubbing in the former horse troughs with perfumed soap, two or three times over, and only then heading into town for a drink and a bed.

"It'll be done soon, Den," she told him one night at the Cock and Bull, "and trust me, nobody cares. These people see folk draw on each other all the time. How," she laughed, "do you think the thane's buildings keep such a fine coat of paint all year long in _this_ weather? Cheap labor from Morrowind?"

Denthryd sulked and took a shot before the ale.

Azuyia leaned in. "He's got that pretty little mansion because fights like yours give him 'compensatory labor.' Isn't that what your sheet said?"

"Something like that," he growled.

"Just be glad this isn't one of the ancient centers like Markarth or, you know, _Windhelm_. I hear they actually string people up for drawing open flame like you did. You gotta learn to let it roll off you, man, and ... control that temper of yours."

Denthryd looked at her. "What did _he_ get for pulling a fekn battle piece on me 'in front of witnesses,' hmm?"

Azuyia smiled. "Oh, you're gonna love this one," she laughed and took a swig at her ale.

"Surprise me," he said flatly.

"Well, I spoke with the council who hands out the papers like you got. Went up to the bailey every day, starting that night when Wys and I were looking into your situation, and continued until I got a short appointment with one of the thane's secretaries. I got all of sixty seconds, but I was told that the guy ... he and his crew, those, had been a nuisance in the hold before. The other five were banned from town, told never to enter the hold again unless they had a writ stating their business, and it's my impression that group doesn't have it in them to procure such things. He, that secretary, told me they were basically a bandit team that had avoided outright trial because they had never hit anything near the capital, and anyone who knew of their doings was too scared to talk. The bully you drew on," she continued, "he has been made an example."

Denthryd swallowed another round, and turned his full body in the seat towards her, leaning on his hand. "Oh?"

Azuyia laughed and smacked her thigh lightly. "Yep. Thane Cenric like I say is not concerned with blood drinkers in the street … yet ... and has just sponsored an entire cohort of Watch. And you know this. Soooooo ... while you are _compensating_ their civil society here by packaging several tons of fertilizer," she gleamed, enjoying her moment just a tad, " _he_ has been asked to work towards the education of Falkreath children while you do it."

Denthryd grumped and motioned for more. "They made him a _teacher_ while I get to shovel shyte and guts?"

"No ... not a teacher," she replied, "and not paid anything just the same. No, he's being trundled to and fro between the primary schools of the entire hold by the thane's personal guard. Each new location, he is required to speak to the assembled group of usually seven- to eleven-year olds about the importance of civil interdependence, the connection of, say," she flourished with her hand, "a magician to a fighting unit in the defense of the country."

"Great. I shovel, he gives speeches about patriotism."

"Not patriotism, silly. They make him wear a robe like ours, only without any capabilities beyond normal cloth."

Denthryd finally smiled. "You're joking."

"No, dead serious. Each school they truck him to gets a scripted speech about respect and citizenship. I cashed in a favor with the thane's staff because I've done some work for them, minor stuff like, well, certain potions people tend to enjoy together, and found out that it takes a good hour or so for him to recite. Can you imagine? That dumbarse must've broken his head over it! Then," she chuckled, "when he's done with that, and every day until you finish your shift, he serves lunch to the kids and cleans up after them. Washes every plate, cup, knife, spoon, and fork. One of those schools, Den, has over seven hundred kids. 'member the war produced orphans."

"Yep."


	10. Chapter 10

Wystan had been gone long enough for them to worry.

"I think I know what he's been up to," Raynu said.

"What's that," Azuyia asked.

"He's pursuing something a novice should only do when forced into a corner, on a world scale, a craft both beyond his current abilities and a waste of time. Dangerous, too."

"Why? What's he doing, you think?"

Raynu stared off.

"Follow me," she said, getting up from the table and gathering a canvas forage sack, raising it over her head and slinging it across her body with the pleated wool pad on her left shoulder and the scabbard-width thick muslin strap running down to her right hip, the grommeted and tied opening in the middle of her back. "We don't need scared citizens or pissed guards showing up because of scared citizens. We're going for a short ride to the fields in front of Wind Face." Raynu buckled her blade.

Azuyia was not unaware the adept was arming herself with ebony. Wind Face was known for the number of hikers, trysting lovers, and wanderers from out of town whose partial corpses turned up with the marks of either live animals or else whose names she had to force out of her thoughts.

" _That_ spot? Why such a grim location, and at least, what, an hour or two on horseback at that?"

"Because it's far enough away from town not to attract attention for my casting, and you're right, most people here are too aware of its reputation to have any business anywhere nearby. I need to show you what I think Wystan is doing. That way you can advise him. Maybe he will listen to _you_. Besides," and here she sounded every bit the highborn," I do not have the time or the patience for intramural squabbles."

On another day Azuyia would have been amused at her mistress's sniffing. This time, however, she felt the tingle in her stomach that she remembered walking in to her first healing demonstration, facing the domina who had walked the battlefields of the Aldmeri war to triage legates and jarls' firstborn between possible crafted cures, excruciating spot surgeries, and slow inevitable death, not having slept a minute the night before while sorting and triple checking her notes on the volume that would be presented to her in a full audience of seniors, consumed instantaneously whether she retained the spell or not. _What do I say? Uh, I forgot that curlicued Alik'r letter at the end of the fourth recitation? That 'suture' and 'sever' look almost identical in Redguard script?_ She was about to get a lesson and had to take a backside bruising ride in the wilds just to get it.

They got down and walked through face-high wild sorghum and winter wheat to a mostly bare expanse of rubble in front of Wind Face, a vertical sheet of smooth diorite blasted to the appearance of dark metal by the air currents across the partial grotto. How Raynu planned on using any material for this demonstration or incorporate normal flame in their process was a mystery to Azuyia. She wondered what time of year this place would actually be the right combination of warm, dry, and calm enough to attract vistors. _People actually want to ... here? Anyway_. Raynu was right, though. They had not seen anybody walking or riding for much of the trip there. The horses shifted and twitched their heads.

"Alright," Raynu said, raising the last part of the word in that way where one might hear an exasperated finality, the kind when someone might say, _Al-right, I'll answer your question_. She turned to Azuyia with her hands down by her sides, fingers together and thumbs up slightly. "Now I will show you something that hopefully illustrates why duffers like me don't want you novas fooling with dangerous _syntheses_ before your time. Face me, but stand way, way back. Over there, by that boulder." She raised both forearms up stiffly and balled both fists.

Azuyia half ran backwards, stumbling and sitting down hard on a chair-sized rock many paces away. Raynu spoke a phrase with a jagged sort of vowel. She blurred, and a sheet of force draped over her body and stayed there in a slow shimmer. It sounded like, wait, no, the stones in a circle around her feet were really splitting in small pieces, popping up a bit and settling. Then they melted. The chips and pebbles turned to droplets of lava before they sank back down, and Raynu's blurry outline expanded upward and outward. The lava bits turned from red-orange to a lapis blue bright enough to stand out even in the midday sun under a clear sky. Her form kept expanding. The illusion of falling force then vanished.

Up until now the most frightened Azuyia had ever been, after leaving her home in Valenwood, was the time she was stopped by a detachment of Thalmor in full moonstone plate checking passage writs and documents, extorting the usual payments for not hauling a Bosmer in to their officer for more questions. She had gotten to Cyrodiil safely and happily, and there lived the city life. That was easy.

Travel, then, to Skyrim had had its tense moments on occasion. There was a situation in the train between the northern Colovian highlands and the pass at Fletchersgate on the Falkreath border when all were told to either get under the wagon or behind someone with a shield. All she heard that time was some of the shouting and a high scream out in Breton, and then after an hour or so one of the armed Khajiit escorts leaned under her wagon and told her to come out. There were so many people in that trading caravan train of wagons, horses, and mules, and those on foot that the entire production came to a confused stop, and would camp right there for two days just to reorganize. That evening in the circus she walked to the head of the train to find the horse-sized body of a dead saber cat. _Yowza_ , she thought, _and they're supposedly as quiet as a house pet until they jump from a perch three stories up_.

"Buhloody tehroor," the Khajiit leader mumbled, sitting there in a striped camp chair, drinking straight out of a Colovian bottle. "Rest assuured," he laughed sardonically, "we weren't couzinz."

Azuyia had been shown drawings in her school books growing up, but seeing an animal with fangs as long as her forearm was something else. As she walked back to her wagon where she had laid out a blanket bedding, she also passed the surgeons talking quietly next to a fire.

"What happened," she asked, I mean, yeah, there was an attack, but ..."

"It got seven out in front," a middle-aged, hard looking Breton answered. He had his hood thrown back on his shoulders, and wore riding boots with steel guards on the shins. From the faint metallic red threading visible on his knee-length robes, Azuyia guessed he was a mage of some sort. "And no, you don't want to see the results."

A tent, expansive for a temporary train camp in a mountain pass with its military canvas and intricate tapestry draping, had been pitched with full iron braziers burning on either side of the entrance. She could smell some sort of herb in their smoke. Best not to ask questions, she thought, but my guess is that this is a funeral.

That had been the closest she had gotten to a really dangerous situation. Everything else about Valenwood, Cyrodiil, and now Skyrim had been just theoretical. Lots of midnight oil, lots of stories (that she listened to) from this or that barkeep or local out by a fountain, and of course the novitiate here lately. She was a scribe and a traveler at this point, and was quite pleased to be such. Azuyia, now, was looking at the most terrifying live appearance of anything she had yet been anywhere near. The figure that had been Raynu, a typically statuesque Bosmer all arms and legs, was now an apparition that could easily reach over the roof ledge of any one-story house there in the village. It was eight or nine feet tall, surfaces the off white of the ivory she had seen carved out of mammoth and horker tusks, and its entire body from the sides of what looked like a head all down its arms, torso, and legs had tusklike protrusions that ended in points as fine as a butcher blade. The thing moved one foot forward and then another, walking towards where Azuyia sat with hands behind her, propping herself up and feeling the shake in her elbows and lips. The damn thing looked like it weighed half a ton.

The eyes gleamed the same lapis lazuli as the transforming lava that Raynu's spell had produced as she took this form. Not pretty gems, these were ghost gleams, phantasm. Its face looked like the sort of helmets on display in the Imperial City collections. She had seen one or two made out of dragon bone locked in crystal cases, works hundreds of years old that had spiky faceplates similar to this thing walking toward her.

 _What in the world? Does Raynu channel or something? What sort of power have I been studying with her?_

"Relax," the thing said in a tone lower than any living being she had ever heard speak Bosmer. _Relax, oh, right, just what I was thinking_. When it spoke, the timbre of the sound forced its way through her ribcage and drummed on her heart, a mallet thumping her viscera with that one word.

"Wwwwh ... aat is this?" Azuyia stuttered. "What are you?!"

"Do we need to play questions? I'm Raynu, and this is the spell."

"What?!"

"The spell that I think Wystan is preparing. He's been inquiring in Dragonsreach, and that's not a place you go expecting to hide."

"Asking about ... ?"

"Scripts," Raynu answered, the amplified tone so low and hard to follow that it took Azuyia a moment, "He wants to cast what you see before you."

"But what is this thing you've done to yourself?" Azuyia sputtered.

"Before I switch back, take a good look. Watch." Raynu walked over to a boulder like the one serving as Azuyia's chair, raised one arm with an enormous, clawed fist balled, bringing it down to a _smack_ on its surface. This embedded the various protrusions on the fist into the surface of the boulder which Raynu then raised up with the single arm, and then flung a couple bodies' length off onto the gravelled expanse in front of the Wind Face grotto. She then kicked with one foot of the carapace at the ground, bringing up enough rocks and earth underneath to fill a large cauldron, the air carrying in the younger woman's direction. Azuyia blinked her eyes and spat some dirt and dust. When she blinked again Raynu had changed back to her taut self and walked up close, not the slightest bit phased. She stood with her hands on her hips as Azuyia managed to get up and brush herself off, fiddling with the strands of hair that had blown in her eyes.

"That," she told the confused novice, "is the _truuk-jall_. Translated from the Orsimer, we call it _killing machine_."

"Wystan is learning this one?

"I believe so. The questions he's been asking point in that direction. From my contacts in the lower courts of Dragonsreach and a few scribenda, I think he wants a flesh chant to combine with that handheld fire you all learn in the basics."

"Is that how you got the ... "

"Don't ask such questions!" Raynu snapped. "You've seen enough! Flesh and energy can produce a powerful, if crude, way of dealing with close combat. It's Orsimer design. Go figure, they love to cleave their way into everything."

"Orcs," Azuyia said meekly.

"Yes, Orcs. They know how to fight. This spell, still and though, is not for novices with an axe to grind in that sense of the phrase. It's for use _in place of_ axes and on real battlefields, and by those who have any business getting themselves into fistfights with armed opponents." Raynu sighed. "This would not be the first time I've heard of a magic student wanting to go toe to toe with a bravo recruit. Not good, sister."


	11. Chapter 11

4E 200 later that month in Rain's Hand

Azuyia walked with the pile of bed linens in off the clotheslines down the hallway past the main pantry, doing chores after the midday meal in the hours before evening seminar, when she stopped next to the cracked door. There was a faint scuffling and some, what? _Those kinda?_ She peeked in the door by pushing it a little open, and started at the sight. Wystan had his back to a wall-high pile of potato sacks and the centuriana, in her duty tunic, was pushed against him as they kissed and twined legs. The Bosmer's heart lifted a little, and she jumped out of eyesight past the door and tried to walk silently to the dormitory hamper down the hall and right.

She rushed in the storeroom and pulled it open with one hand, balancing the clean sheets in the other, letting the pile drop to the floor as she achingly closed the door shut. Azuyia picked up the unfolded pile and scooped it on a stout work table, folding slowly and listening. She took her time. After staying as long as she could, the hour getting close to recitations of a fun Breton canto about damnation, she opened the door slowly. Centuriana Ulia was standing a little ways down the hall, leaning with her arms crossed and one knee raised with greaved sole against the wall. She had on her armor and sword.

Azuyia pulled a sheaf of paper from the morning's notes out immediately, looking at is as she closed the door behind her with studied absentmindedness, muttering out random things from the page and pretending to read as she walked in the centuriana's direction (the passage back out to the right leading only to another minor pantry with a lock, the one with the refreshment casks). As she tried to shuffle her way past, she saw Ulia look down at her right knuckles.

"Did you get enough for lunch," came the question.

"Ma'am," she feigned lost in thought and looked up at the officer.

"I asked ... 'did you get enough to eat,'" Ulia looked at her with a curious expression, a mix of martial interrogation and amusement faintly at the sides of the mouth. "Or should I speak with the magistra about your ... dietary needs?"

"Oh no! Ma'am, the eggs and bacon were delicious. Haven't eaten this well in a while!"

"Good. Then you won't be lingering about your chores in the halls afterwards."

"No ma'am, absolutely not."

"Very good," the centuriana turned with ease, speaking as she walked away, "I do enjoy your company here at the college."


	12. Chapter 12

"Problem," Azuyia asked him as they all stared at the plain leading up to the fabled crossroads of three holds.

"Nooo," Wystan said, staring out over the busy road, "but I don't remember any highways ever being this crowded." In town later, he stopped in the wide boulevard and pushed his cloak out to both sides with hands rubbed with a delighted smirk across his belly.

"Heyyyy ... looka herrre," his expression turned impish.

Azuyia and Denthryd were still chewing at the smoked wild turkey legs wrapped in paper they had gotten at the first stand inside the festive quarter.

"Whatph?" Azuyia asked him, eating.

Denthryd went to a short queue at an ale stand right there. The object of Wystan's gaze was a coil of folks pushing to get in line to one of the buildings where drums and flutes could be heard each time the door was opened by a tall Breton woman in field leather with a studded quarterstaff in her hand. The head of the line stood several paces away from the door, approached each time by a fantastic, tanned Nord woman in an aquamarine body wrap, dangling ruby and silver earrings. Her bleached blonde hair was pulled into an intricate stylistics full of rings and ties, and she wore many silver bangles on each wrist, scarlet and orange dyed calfskin boots that reached her thighs. The door to the otherwise not notable town building had been hung on either side with ribbons of the same scarlet and orange at iron rings set into the front wall.

"Di-belll-as," he said precisely.

Denthryd walked back up with a tankard of dark ale to his mouth, holding two more out to his observing fellows. Azuyia took one, Wystan didn't even notice. The Bosmer pitched her turkey bone into the nearest rubbish pile, pushing a short distance through the crowd to the opposite side of the wide drag, and back. Denthryd was standing there looking all around, turning his head here and there.

"Yyyeahh," Azuyia said, standing right next to him, "where's our brother," she asked slyly.

"Oh, in line," he answered, distracted by the boulevard.

"Uh-hum, yes, and is good sir going to go for a tour, hm?"

Denthryd remembered the first time his parents had allowed him to the Windhelm docks when he was fourteen. Up until then he'd been told to stay around the village, do his chores, and stay out of trouble. Life growing up until then was Snowmill, Snowmill, Snowmill. They didn't own a horse, and trips to the nearest village Rock Creek at least ten miles away were only for the humble feasts their locality could put out for First Seed in the spring and Heartfire in the fall, tables of pickled cabbage, smoked salmon, and jars of the two villages' only product to make it on cargo manifests shipping all over the country— sealed jars of smoked sprats in vegetable oil. _Man_ , he thought, _I never thought I'd get the smell of that stuff off me before I left_. He had been amused when Azuyia came bounding into commons one night after study with a loaf of fresh bread and a jar of, yay, smoked sprats in oil so they could have a luxurious midnight snack of northern seafood.

He had been dying for some exposure to anything, anything beyond the firs, the same stretch of river when he was growing up, and he'd never forget the day mom and pop told him to put on his cloak because they were taking him on their walk to the city. They stopped two nights on the way at folks' homes for shepherd's pie and warm conversation. The adults, too, seemed relieved to be away from the Snowmill monotony. It was the late morning of that third day when Windhelm came into view as they walked on the road up the bank of River Yorgrim. Down the long drawbridge, past the check by two guards with questions, he laughed remembering his mother trying to hold his hand as they pushed through the crowd, shaking it off, being a man of fourteen, blitzed with the instantaneous change in scene as they walked through the city gate into the ancient hold capital. He followed his parents as they made no stops until walking down the wide alleys to the dockside.

Wow, and that was a sight upon sights that day. Hundreds of ships, some with prows carved into strange creatures two stories high, spread out in both directions at the pilings and boardwalks. Folk he had never seen before, the man-sized Khajiit with their feline heads and claws, Argonians with scales and gills, Dunmer elves with skin the color of slate, all dressed in the widest variety of colors and styles.

After a couple hours' business his parents conducted signing inventories and manifests for sprat and salmon orders, they took a break and ate at a long dining stand there by the water. They sat on stools and watched the crowd, smelled the pungent spices on frying seafood.

"What's that he's making," Denthryd had asked his mother, pointing at the nearest bartender who was packing fried crabcakes into split half loaves of bread and drizzling the meat with a light brown sauce.

She had smiled wistfully. _Crabcake po'boy, son, like they make them in the southlands_.

He had excitedly asked her when she and dad had been there, never hearing word one of any travels they had undertaken, ever. They had looked at each other, and his father snapped his fingers at the bartender and then raised three with a nod. His father had pushed a tankard of mead in his hand, and he remembered the way the two of them hit the bar with the edge of their tankards, downed a sip, and then clanked the tips together. That, too, they had never done in front of him. _He's old enough_ , his father had said, turning to look out at the docks and lean against the bar as three of the savory plates were delivered behind them. His father put his arm around his mother. That's when they told him about their service in the Great War.

His parents had made the hard ride with others all the way to the Pale to be volunteer auxiliaries with the Solitude Blues medium line, a full Legion in a permanent fortress stationed there since Riften had been burned in an uprising two generations prior. Not that General Tullius and the Blue Palace cared much for the extreme southeastern province of Skyrim known best for drug smuggling and infestations of the frostbite spiders able to singly take an entire century, no, it was more a strategic placement of trusted eyes and ears should the need arise. When war came from southern Cyrodiil, the entire garrison was called east and then south to a corps assembling for campaign over the border in the Cyrodiilic mountains. It was to be a terrible, four-year engagement with Thalmor raiding parties.

Denthryd had gone into town three years later to sign a cargo slip for them, happy to see the Crusty Crab diner was still operating, and sat down for a po'boy and some ale. He noticed an unusually smiley group of the roughshod lords and ladies off these sailing ships lining up outside of a door way down the docks. It had the scarlet and orange streamers flying high. _Hey_ , _what're_ _they doing_ , he had asked the kneeshaking Dunmer sailor next to him.

She snorted her ale and clapped him on the shoulder. _It's a little beyond your coin, lad_.

"Den ... Den?" he heard her say.

"Yeah?"

"Wells," Azuyia joked and raised both hands palms up at him, "you going in, too, or not?"

Dibellas, dear reader, is the slang use of the goddess name for female employees of an expensive cathouse, licensed by towns populous enough to tolerate the open marketing of an otherwise discreet business. Both women and men worship her beauty and zest, yet only women become devotees introduced to her mysteries. It was curious to some of a more conservative Nordic bent how one of the nine divines had come to be associated with, well, you know ... but this going on thirty years of recession and strife a major swathe of the population could care less. It wasn't like every major field unit didn't have a traditional camp following that included the sanguine services, and some enlightened burghers and public functionaries actually listened to the Kynareth priests and priestesses, those of another divine who managed the hospitals. Licensure and good management, the staunch guild class realized, might be connected to fewer cases of the Dibella's rattles.

He snapped out of it. "Nooo, Zuyyiaaa."

She laughed and crooked his elbow, and they walked arm in arm swigging, stopping up the boulevard to stand in line for tickets to Tasha's Troupe the following evening.


	13. Chapter 13

A junoesque Altmer with long, silky hair the hue of moonlight pulled up and back through a silver band strode by. Wystan bit his lip to keep from smiling. Azuyia, she had been to the beaches once or twice along her country's southern coast, and however much or little summer garb didn't phase her. Wystan was more trying to avoid busting out in a laugh at Denthryd's face, and Azuyia's look askance. His eyes hadn't taken a moment to drop and raise openmouthed and speechless.

"Ahem," Azuyia cleared her throat looking straight at him as he stared.

"Wyssss," Denthryd asked, "what sort of magic is this?" The Altmer had Breton tattoos all over her body, and at least one pronounced scar on her arm. She wore an Imperial dagger at her hip on a thin leather belt with an heraldic order repeated on its entire surface, that and, well, a little bit of magenta enameled steel in addition to her mid-shin leather boots with high heels.

Wystan couldn't take it anymore and sputtered a laugh, holding his forefinger knuckle to his mouth. "It's illusion, man. Haven't you even heard of it?"

"Yes," Denthryd replied vaguely, "I haave ... but, this. Is an illusion?"

"Man, are you from," and then instead of antagonizing the other Nord yet again about his upbringing, he changed directions fast. "Yes, um, take her," he motioned at the Altmer walking away, "that constume she's wearing. Her target doesn't see her like that."

The other man blinked widely.

Azuyia's foot tapped a bit.

"Heh, and what does she appear to be for this _target_?"

"All I know is what I have seen at these before. I got dad to let me go to a couple when we were in Imperial City a couple years ago, wow. _That_ was a convention! Take the scene here in this little bulwark and place it in a freakn palace. Hundreds of people from all over working their illusions, trading. This is just play time for adepts. You _prrob_ -ably won't find anyone at our grade doing much here, heh, illusion can get dangerous, too." He grinned and took in the scene.

"We know the term, Wys," Azuyia broke the spell, "but what is this 'targeting' you're referring to? How do those," she motioned at the Altmer, " _strings_ aid her cast? And if she looks like that to us, what ... "

"Relax, Zu," Wystan said, still trying not to laugh, "she looks like that to everyone in the room except someone who's agreed to practice the illusion with her. Know how we sat up a week ago in Southall on that oh-so fun conjuration?"

"Will I ever forget," Azuyia replied with a grimace, "pulling a wet hound out of the ether at four a.m. who proceeds to wake up the marm with his barking? I get a letter on my breakfast plate two hours later, not that we slept while the blessed pooch lit up the hall, and I have to answer to the centuriana about keeping sound morals in the girls' dorm _in front of magistra_ , then the three of us get dishwashing for a week? Yeah, I remember."

"We got the talk, too, Zuyi," Denthryd mumbled.

"If we hadn't taken that measure, all three of us together, Zuyi, we might have poofed another glowing slaughterfish to flop all over the floor in front of the entire novitiate."

"Yeah, I know," she said.

"So what does a passable conjured animal have to do with," Denthryd exclaimed, "this?"

"Different form of magic, different form of collaboration, man. I don't know illusion yet, myself, I've only been to a few of these parties to observe," he grinned loudly, "like I told you. From what I've worked out of a player or two in those big Imperial bashes," he pointed at the gorgeous Altmer, "her spell probably has something to do with the appearance of a Whiterun soldier. See the horse head over an abased black fesse on a yellow shield all over the belt? I'll bet she looks like a typical deputy. Could be male or female, could be larger or smaller, somewhat, than her physical form. She's been talking to that one," he chuckled, "with her this entire time."

Azuyia rolled her eyes and asked, "Is there something _I_ am supposed to take away from this? I can see what _you_ two are, hm?"

Standing with the Altmer in the belt and trim was a fairskinned woman from Cyrodiil with seafoam green hair spiked out on one side and draping over her left eye on the other, slightly shorter and shaped like a dancer, wearing undyed fur moccasins over her knees and a blacksmith's apron dyed to match her hair. Denthryd had shaken off his disbelief at this town hall meeting of dragonbone and masks.

"And what," Azuyia continued archly, "do these, heh, get-ups contribute to a good illusion, if I hear you right, since all but the targeted audience are looking at," she pointed at the Imperial woman, "nightwalker's boots and a smith's apron _sans the dress that goes with the apron_?"

"Heehee," Wystan glowed, "my dad told me about that particular cast. He'd had to learn about it, at least, very early on in starting his business. The name for that it would seem, from what he told me, in all languages translates to something like 'hot blacksmith.'"

Azuyia scoffed. "Oh, that's bloody funny. So we walk around tarted in order to, what? Make it look like we have a profession that we actually work standing up?"

"The unfortunate recipient of that one, the very effective 'hot blacksmith' which dad told me is employed by adepts of both sexes, that one on hitting the target has two results. First, any selling prices asked by the poor sot to whom this, well," he rubbed his stomach lightly.

"Will ... you ... PLEASE!"

Wystan's smile faded, and his tone became everyday. "The man or woman under her influence believes they are seeing the head of an international company like the ones whose stamps you find on crates from the capitals. We're talking groups with assets in caverns of gold and other commodities. That performer will look the part and deliver the lines perfectly, have the air, probably appear to be wearing several thousand septims' in cloth and accoutrements. That brings the main effects. The target will lower prices as far as the caster's ability to channel the magicka will get her, and fork over a similar percentage if she offers to sell something. Yet another reason a Nord businessman tends to distrust those like us," he turned to her. "Mara love the dumbarse who overestimates the time limit of his or her abilities. Let it expire in a deal, and you can enjoy the inside joke with the wise money's staff holding wootz stilettos to your throat. As for the costumes, haha, I think that's just part of the game. Take that one over there," he redirected Azuyia to look at the immense figure in a robe of foreign make she couldn't identify by national origin or purpose. "That's definitely not intended to have someone seeing a serene lady of the river and skip work to go have cakes." It was the one who had walked by with the horned dragonbone mask.

 _No_ , she thought, _it would be a stretch to imagine that one having a fun, lighthearted outcome._

"Let's go mix, Zuyi," Wystan gestured towards Denthryd, who had wandered over to a table piled with sliced meats and fruit, and they had a silver goblet of something with a male Argonian dressed in scarlet and gold harlequin.


	14. Chapter 14

4E 200 the next afternoon on the fields outside of Pompa Concorda

"Oh man, looka that," Wystan said through his pipe, pointing downhill to a cluster of people beginning to chant and shout in Breton and Nordic.

"Whas that," Azuyia asked through the potent mixture of herbs Wystan had brought for the trip. He was pointing at a group of revelers from all over with two distinct smaller groups at the center standing a few paces away from each other.

"Friendly international relations," Denthryd asked. The two lines standing a little ways apart at the center of the scrum wore uniform colors, and the lines, as they stood up and looked closely, were all Breton on one side, all Nord on the other.

"Hoo man, this is gonna get fun," Wystan exhaled, coughing and wiping his eyes.

"What is?" Azuyia asked.

"Comes with the territory. Those," he pointed again, "they're sports fans."

"Hm?" Denthryd wondered.

"Sports. Legion sports. I can't quite make out the insignia, but that's definitely game day cloth down there. Heh, maybe someone organized an amateur match somewhere around here. Didn't see it listed on the leaf."

 _Another thing Snowwheresville, Eastmarch did not have a clue about_ , Denthryd thought to himself.

"And what are these sports that," Azuyia motioned at the ballyhoo, "folks are so, uh, eager about?"

Shoving matches were starting and the rhythmic chanting in Breton and Nordic, some archaic verse it sounded to her, had become general shouting and cheering.

"Heh, you're gonna love this one, Boichie, another human curiosity for your college study."

Azuyia hurrumphed mildly at this.

"The Legion has in its many international and local traditions a series of field games each year. Each distinct unit, like the Fifth Watch, chooses teams. The game, heh, it starts with intrasquad cooloffs the given unit's commanders allow the soldiers on major deployments and occupations any time, anywhere. Gotta get them to something other than drinking, fighting, and wh..."

"Yeahyeah," Azuyia interrupted, "and this game, then?"

"Like I say, you're gonna die," he grinned through his crescent eyes, "they drive stakes in the ground on a level field, mark off an area that apparently is uniform for any match in any part of the empire, and each team stands on opposite ends of the field. Whewww I'd love to see how they do it on a stretcha Reach quarry fields. If it's intrasquad, then I suppose a unit like the Watch just has their way of deciding who runs in what direction. On the official matches, it's one unit's team against the other, like the Watch raiders against the XIV Southern."

"Against? Is this a form of combat training?"

"Funny you should put it that way," Wystan continued. "No, not _offic_ ially. Not that any commoner sports fan would admit. It's all for fun, eh?" He laughed. "So they have this ball like kids play with, only bigger and heavier, made out of leather and stuffed with cotton, hay, what have you. It's basically an air bladder. The presiding official, in intrasquads the unit commander, places the ball in the middle of the field, and then leaves to call go. Then, whoa man, it begins."

"And this is what our Imperial taxes pay for," Denthryd asked.

"Naw man, they'd have it with or without a tax year. The clubs that support the army teams can be found in any town anywhere, just depends where you are which colors you'll see on the tavern wall. And be careful about even _mentioning_ ball if you are in one. Sport is a religion to some folk drinking in those places," Wystan's eyes widened, then back.

"Right. Then, let me guess. Each of these," he nodded towards the shoving and punching going on down below them to the yells and hurrahs of the crowd, "groups must try to own the ball?"

"Haha, own. That's a good word for it. They run like a battle charge straight at each other, lower their shoulders, and see who is still standing as someone tries to get the ball."

"Do they," Azuyia asked, "wear any form of armor on their heads or shoulders for this?"

"Nuuuupe," Wystan answered, "just duty tunics if it's within the unit, regimental colors if at an Imperial sanctioned playing field. And yes, collarbones get broken all the time in the opening minute."

"Sounds delightful," she said.

"Oh, that's just the rush, the first play. Then they have a series of maneuvers designed to get the ball down the field to the opposing team's ground and out across the boundary marked by the stakes. It's kinda reminiscent of an infantry formation, although not much related to it since they're unarmed and just throwing a ball back and forth. But maaaan does it get rough. I went to one of the big Cyrodiilic matches one season with my dad when he took me on his deal in Imperial City. One of the perks if you buy or sell to some highroller, heh. You would not _believe_ the scene. They have this circular building made out of marble five stories high, whew! Once you get through the gates and follow the crowd up to the benches, there musta been fifty thousand people watching."

"Fifty ... thousand," Denthyrd asked incredulously.

"Yes. Tens of thousands. And not a sober face among them. Skooma and pipes are strictly prohibited, heh, although peeps sneak back under the seating area to light up all the time," he grinned, "but you should SEE the rows of vendors at THAT place. Hundreds and hundreds of barrels, iron stoves capable of roasting dozens of chickens at once, spitted game everywhere. You eat freakn well at an Imperial ball game."

"Subject to Imperial added taxes, I presume," Denthryd muttered.

"Oh cut it, man, you're harshing my buzz. Relax! We're here!"

Denthryd grumbled and swigged from a mead bottle.

 _Skooma_ , in case you don't know or haven't guessed, is a strong distillation of the illegal substance _moon sugar_. It pops up in every town and city in Skyrim, and can occasionally be found in the grey market goods section of an apothecary or general store. Like the stamina decotions novices learn to make in their studies of alchemy, skooma reinvigorates exhausted bodies for a short period of time. It makes the wet log you've been swinging at an opponent feel like a cinquain blade once again, and perhaps live to tell about it. Skooma also taxes the metabolism like the other strong spirits fighters and adventurers of all castes stow in their packs. Take too much refined moon sugar too fast, and you may as well have downed a bottle of Colovian on top of those last four pints.

The substance has other properties, though, which make it more dangerous than the various aqua vitae to be found throughout Tamriel. While mead on the trail can be sentimental, easing the blisters with all those memories of hearth smoke and tales of the one that got away, skooma does just the opposite. Take a sip of the liquid from that refined powder, and you forget everything, and by some accounts it's just too much fun. Weeks of boredom on a freezing granite overlook wrapped in a wet horsehide tarp on top of your Legion cloak and armor, the same tools you've been stationed with for weeks as sole conversation, more often than not a completely empty belly— it's not hard to imagine why a tiny vial of a substance that kills hunger, jacks your energy up five notches, and makes staring at the same stretch of pines and frozen hills bloody interesting might make it into the marching kits of everyone from Legion rankers to noble guildmasters, personally overseeing the dicey passage of an expensive shipment.

The Legion had, as it always has, taken a laisser-faire attitude towards skooma in the ranks during off-duty, even more so on forced marches and bad campaigns, as it did other amusements just so long as civility with the local population was maintained, laws obeyed, and services (yes) paid for. The latter earned it the nickname _trail powder_ before the war. Since the institution of the Penitus Oculatus by the powers in Imperial City which would stretch, by now, into a countrywide network of information gathering, orders had come down from the top that any possession or use of skooma by any enlisted soldier at any time would be subject to a general inquisition. You might suppose that the occasional stash found by a detachment on petty patrol duty sent to clean up a bandit camp just might not make it onto the report when back in town, but nobody was talking about it.

What's more, the garden variety trail powder that actioners favored was not the only one available for purchase. If you knew who to talk to, there were dens, some in unsavory urban districts, some literally out in the middle of nowhere. Nobody just walked into a skooma den. Remember, these little bottles were worth many times their weight in gold, so, like the coastal smuggling hot spots, people kept their distance if the vibe of such activity started making itself felt in the area. Those dens and dealers could sell you a bottle of the stuff that, whew ... how you'd swing a sword after that one, you tell me. Mainly, the smaller city centers and rural communities wanted to keep it away from their livelihoods, that fine balance of work ethic, weather patterns, animal husbandry, trade routes which kept a town alive for another generation or watched it dry up and blow away. Nobody openly dealt skooma outside of the capital cities and the smugglers' grottos. A strong hallucinogen, it tended to take over the lives of those who used it too often, and so one less hand in the fields who also needed at least as much food and water at the end of the day did not go over well with the postwar country villages.

Then there are the hold capitals. Urban centers with dense populations, travelers and recent transplants from all over Tamriel, the jarls had their hands full keeping any kind of order without Thalmor-style martial law. People had been too recently exposed to atrocity for the hereditary monarchs to risk a regional rebellion over another tax on thistle brandy distilled in the Falkreath lowlands, or some pious ordinance about the proper cut of tunics and dresses. Besides, one jarl's hold rises up like that, the neighboring holds take notice. No, apothecary enforcement was not high on the priority lists of the major population centers, and that is where one would find all of it.

"Anyhoo, the game I saw, wow. It was two teams from the Guards VI Main out of the capitol and the Anvil Coast Dragoons, also known to fans as the Phalanx and the Galeriders. At one of those games, man, they have a bank of fanfare trumpets on each side that blasts the countdown to the game, oh, and then silence is called and you have to listen to some solemn declaration about Titus Mede's importance by a blahdeeblah, ump!"

Azuyia had elbowed him. "Shhhh! Not so loud! Remember where we are," she said.

"As if anyone can hear, or cares, Zuyia," Wystan quipped back.

"Still! That group," she pointed at the coming brawl, "is about as invested in those solemn declarations as you're gonna _get_ , would be my guess. Just saying."

Wystan gave her a bored look, then continued. "Right. So then, as in any muddy scrum anywhere in the empire, they run at each other on the most perfectly uniform stretch of steppe grass you'll ever see. I still can't figure out how, even in Imperial City, one manages a perfect rectangle of thumb-high steppe grass. Hmm. So they proceed with their game plays, throwing the ball to each other, running with it, kicking it up in the air. Whichever side has crossed the limit of the other side the most times wins."

"I don't get it," the Bosmer shrugged. "Sounds bloody boring. And how long do these fascinating displays last?"

"Oh ... that's because you haven't seen the action. Six hours, counting the official player rest breaks, during which time there's dancers and singing. It's basically ritualized unarmed combat with a whooole lotta little rules. For example, a closed fist to the upper cheekbone with no knuckle touching the eye is allowed, however any blow intentionally aimed at the nose or mouth in the course of a play is called out."

"This is ridiculous," Denthryd said. "How in Talos' name do they determine that, much less see it from a crowd of fifty thousand?"

"They have guards on the field whose sole purpose is to run in the middle of it all and watch. Course," he grinned, "smart money is the informal intrasquads are a lot ... less ... officiated."

"Like breaking up children, sounds like," Azuyia said.

"Heh, right. Those guards dowear light field leathers, and it's a good way to lose a player if they see you throw a punch at an official."

"Run up and down a segment of grass ... with an oversized kid's toy ... and beat hell out of each other for their and other's amusement. _Humans_. Sounds more like something the orcs would enjoy."

"You got it, sis. You gotta be among the toughest in the Legion, and definitely the biggest brawlers in your unit, to get to play ball for the Emperor. See, those ones have faced off against Thalmor detachments, and worse. It's more than just child's play. It's ... yes ritual, an honorific. Each team sends its best fighters to the yearly rounds and the crowd knows that these are the champion defenders of their borders, or at least that's what they advertise in Imperial City. What you're seeing down there," motioning to the fighting down the hill from where they were standing, slowly being broken up by a few armored festival guards, "that's another dimension of the Imperial sporting organization."

"How so," Denthryd asked.

"Wellll ... he leaned in to the other Nord, "not everyone that isn't a Stormcloak absolutely loves the Imperials and all things Cyrodiil. Notice the ones in red down there are all Nord, the ones in black are all Breton."

"But ... they're fans, not soldiers. I don't see any of the markings on them."

"Don't be so sure, still those are most likely just common folk down there wearing their team's colors. It's what their team represents that's got them all fired up. See, Imperials control the majority of Legion units from the top. Oh, you'll get a Nord or a Breton rise to legate, likewise Redguard and some Mer-folk, and I'm sure if you read _Brief History of the Empire_ ," he laughed, "you'd find a non-Imperial general here or there. It's a safe bet, though, that it's much easier for an Imperial to rise to legate of a Cyrodiilic unit and damn near impossible for anyone else to get above that. And that," he said towards the calming scene, "shows you folks' pent up frustration about the lack of Breton and Nord leadership promotion past centurion in units from their own localities. There's a broad swathe of people in Skyrim that fall between Imperialist hardliners and Stormcloaks. Folks just want fair representation and real pay, two items not always apparent in solemn decrees," he slowed his speech to careful pronunciation at the last two words, but it was too loud for Azuyia to have heard him. "So common fans look to the legionnaire players to represent them on the playing field, the only place where those men and women can throw a punch at another country's unit _legally_."

"I don't get it, though, Wystan," Denthryd replied in a regular voice, "if Nord and Breton soldiers serve in the same units sometimes, why would these two teams whose fans we see here cheer if they knew it was Nord against Nord, Breton against Breton in some of those plays."

"That's just it, my friend. That's empire."

"We're all on the same team," Azuyia said with a facetious lilt.

"High Rock and Skyrim will always be there, though, as countries and people have always lived in their towns and villages where they've been going, oh, a couple centuries to talk about last year's regional match in the tavern, take themselves away from a drought harvest or a dried supply line, warm their hands from swinging a hammer or a pitchfork. Those games are as much tribal warfare as they are Imperial ceremony. Like I say, don't forget that if you want to stay at a Littlestead, Anywhere inn with a seventy-year old Cyrodiilic championship goblet on a stand behind the bar, or if you want to walk back out of there alive."

"Beautiful," Denthryd said flatly.

"C'mon, guys! Let's have another round and go walk around," Wystan said, pulling out his herb satchel.

"Wyssssss," Azuyia tsked.

The bruiser lines had loosened and were walking away, still glaring at each other and shouting epithets. A massive Breton, staring down a guard with lowered helmet visor half a pace in front of him, let a fist-sized piece of gneiss fall from his hand to the ground while keeping up the staring contest a few more seconds, turned, and walked away with his buddies. A Nord woman in red called out, "Dropped yer rock!"

Thence the Pompa guards again stood with both arms out, keeping the fans of the Hroldan Watch team, also known as the White Rapids, from laying into fans of the Wayrest Third Lowlanders team, the Jetty Wolves, with the sundry shivs and blackjacks easily carried in festival pockets.


	15. Chapter 15

The three pulled off the road and tethered their horses at a single two story house on a side road southeast of Pompa Concorda, a mere dip in the trade highway from Falkreath. It advertised bed and breakfast on a shingle with a maintained painting of a bright orange circle with a green arrow pointed upwards crossing a gold bend sinister.

 _Odd_ , Denthryd had thought as they walked to the steps leading up to the covered porch after paying a Nord woman to tether and feed their horses. _An inn with no name_. Wystan was walking between him and Azuyia, and nudged both their arms, stopping short of the first step, pointing at the sign.

They were famished after the early bolt from Southall on a glorious morning two days ago, having gotten permission from Raynu to spend the break out in the hold. The three met at the commons before dawn and ran to Fletchersgate stables down the road, hopped on the first carriage out, and thrilled the entire ride. They were away for the first time since induction, two weeks of freedom! They had laughed and told stiff-'ol-magistra jokes and passed around a bottle of Colovian they had smuggled out of the larder, trying to shrug off the expectation of their final examinations in front of the domina and their peers. They rode until the carriage stopped off the highway at the village of Plainstead and haggled some crashspace on the floor in front of the hearth. After soup and bread, the innkeepers who lived above the shop just tiredly told them to put away the chairs and keep it down. The next day they paid for horses and rode furthur, slightly north-by-northeast.

He spoke in a low whisper. "I'd watch your language in here," he said, "that's the Bastards crest."

"The who," Azuyia asked just before Denthryd could get the same out.

"See the bend sinister across the arrow?"

"Yessss ..."

"This place is in some way affiliated with the Fifth Steppe Watch. They had maneuvers near town several times when I was growing up." Denthryd crossed his arms. There hadn't been any colors in the camp he helped dismantle. "That's right, Den," Wystan turned to him, "do not kvetch about anything you had to do and it would probably be a good idea that we don't call you by name. These guys are as tight as any Legion unit, word travels fast."

Azuyia shrugged. "But he didn't do anything to _them_ ," she began, leading off as Denthryd looked at her with scrunched lips.

"Not the point. If we want to eat and sleep in anything like peace, we walk in there on our best behavior, put up with their anti-magic shyte smiling and buying rounds, and go to bed early. Understand? We ... I at least ... am tired and don't want to be their fun for the evening," he almost raised his voice to a normal volume.

"Ah," she replied with a slight nod to one side. "And they call themselves the Bastards."

"You got it," Wystan said, flipping his right hand and starting up the stairs, turning to finish, "have to be to ride breakneck at Thalmor formations using only your legs. As a matter of fact," he stopped and stepped back down the steps, "we need to change costumes," and walked off back toward the stables.

Denthryd and Azuyia followed him to the opened doors there. The Nord, forties, strongly built by the look of her forearms showing at the black work dress rolled to her elbows and the way the cloth draped over her shoulders, and nearly as tall as Denthryd rested a pitchfork against the door of one empty stall where she had been working. She walked over to them and stood without gesturing. She had a heart-shaped face, didn't appear to use any cosmetic on her skin, had blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her dress ended just below the knees, and they noticed hardened high boots from there down.

"Yes?"

"Pardon, ma'am," Wystan started.

"Oh, puh-leez," she smiled, "we're not at court, kid." She laughed lightly.

"Excuse me," he continued, "but we, um, stink from our ride here. Would it be too much trouble that we, each, changed in here before talking with the innkeeper?" That, and they were standing next the horse barn. Their heavy cloaks with bearskin mantles and hood linings completely covered the casting robes underneath, and their boots were the typical medium forager's footwear that most anyone would wear in Heartfire when preparing for a ride through possible freezing rain. The woman shrugged.

"As you like it," she winked at Azuyia, who reddened but said nothing, and walked out. "I'll close the doors for you," she barely got out without laughing.

"Great," the Bosmer said as she walked over to the furthest empty stall with her knapsack and jerked her cloak up over her head, throwing it on the upper edge of the stall door after closing it carelessly. The cloak slid off onto the straw floor outside where she stood. "I," she continued with her back turned, pulling the robe over her head and kneeling down out of sight, "have traded magic jive for unsolicited _offers_!"

"I'm sure she's seen far worse than us changing in her barn, Zuyi," Denthryd said.

He and Wystan were doing as she was, getting out of their cloaks and robes, putting on dry extra clothes. Denthryd had brought the shirt Azuyia had given him as a welcome-back present, and threw it on over a worn pair of thick cotton trousers dyed with snowberry mordant. Wystan, he noted, as usual made no attempt to look the commoner. He had brought an embroidered man's dinner frock with coral embellishments and a pair of what appeared to be Alik'r riding pants, loose, flowing ones out of material not produced in the likes of Windhelm's garment district. There you would find only tundra cotton work clothes, "special" tundra cotton wedding clothes, leather, and oilskin. Must have a thousand septims on him, Denthryd sighed silently. _Oh well, he doesn't speak the commoner, either. Best not to bull these guys_. Azuyia stepped out of the stall in a two-piece green tunic, Bosmer style.

"Do I look the part? Or should I be in hetaira scarlet as the Imperials like it, hmm?

"Drop it, wouldja" Denthryd complained. Azuyia pointed at his face, walked past the two of them, and pushed the door open.

"Gentlemen," she said sarcastically, holding her legs together and shifting her hips, motioning dramatically with her left hand towards the tavern.

Wystan, the trader's son, stopped and looked at her. "It's in their best interest, A-zu-yia," he let his pronunciation of her name roll out deliberately, "that whomever we find in there not harass customers of any stripe, regardless of any Legion connection, so unless you openly solicit you are most definitely safer in there than your typical backwoods roadhouse, see? They want folks coming back just like any b-and-b, and Watch roughs _don't_ have the most coin around." She relaxed a little, shrugged, led the way towards the inn's front steps. The two men, following, noted the diagonal leather harness she had strapped across her tunic top had her scramasax sheathed on her back.

When they walked in, they found a nearly empty common room surprisingly intimate for the size of the building. It seemed more suited for, as Wystan had put it, a frontless six-stooler on a wagon trail out in the sticks. Sure enough, the place had some Legion regalia. Just inside the door there was a military weapons rack to their right, empty except for a nicked double-bit Nordic axe with loose wrapping and rusty studs. Every round dinner table, all four of them, had fresh Watch colors painted in the center. On the wall to their left, among the various bone bits, sword shards, and framed pieces of cloth there was a threadbare, carefully hung Watch battle flag with traces of the original gilt on the tassels at its corners. To either side, they noticed, were also other flags still on their standard poles, some complete enough with their brightly painted spikes to have been in a headquarters museum in Cyrodiil, some on partial poles with splintered ends and cloth hanging in brown rags, lots of Thalmor blue. A single man in a russet Legion dressing tunic and boots sat at the table nearest the bar with his hand on a mug, sixties, maybe seventies, clean shaven head and white handlebar mustache, still had on his duty bracers. He and the bartender looked at the three of them. There was nobody else there, the only sound from the expansive log fireplace hissing slightly above the cold wind through the gap below the door.

"Evening," the bartender called over to them. "Helpya?" He was the same era as the seated man, and the sort of presence these two had stopped the three novices from walking over too fast. The bartender, also bald, had bushy white mutton chops and a white scar from his upper left temple down a jagged path to the left side of his neck, the left ear split in half but somehow still there. They were both the size of line troops, and still had the tree limb arms that looked carved out of Reach granite.

Azuyia took the first step. "Uhum, yes," she replied to him, "we've been traveling from Fletchersgate on our way over to Pompa Concorda." Neither man changed demeanour or moved. "We ... would like to eat and stay the night?" She walked over to a barstool, Denthryd and Wystan following, but did not yet sit down. The bartender's eyes went over her head straight to Denthryd.

"You."

"We're all from Fletchersgate. We ... "

"Eastmarcher?"

"Yes, and not Windhelm. Denthryd Saltersson," he moved foreward and extended his hand. Wystan and Azuyia drew in muted breaths at this. The bartender shook it after an awkward pause. If the guy had heard about Denthryd's standoff with the bandit and its eventualities, his face did not show a thing.

"Fishmonger ... then," the seated man said. Wystan and Azuyia stood very still.

"That's right," Denthryd said straight to him. "I'm on vacation with my friends here. We're going to Pompa to hear Tasha's Troupe." At this the seated man grumped and chuckled, raising his mug and taking a swig, mumbling something about fekn bards and bloody kids.

"Then tell me," the bartender said, looking at knife he had been wiping with a rag, "fishmonger, lover of song. What is the fifth line of _The Age of Aggression_?"

 _Yep_ , Denthryd thought. "It's 'Down with Ulfric, the killer of kings,' sir," he recited. _Does he really think I'd be dumb enough to say 'All hail Ulfric, you are the high king,' here, if I actually were Stormcloak? Then again, you're thinking like a mage, man_.

"Ha!" The bartender laughed loudly down at the blade, put it away, and placed both hands on the bar. "Whattya three's have? Oh, and miss, you'll need to put that on the rack. House rules," he pointed over her shoulder at the hilt of the sax.

They actually had a fine time that night talking with the two men, both Nords and ex-Watch, veterans before the Aldmeri war had even started twenty-nine years ago. Quite pleasantly surprised, the friends had found two chaps that enjoyed visitors and attention to their voluminous life experience. The only faux pas by their young listeners was Wystan's reference to the innkeeper's "daughter," who in reality was his wife. They had met and married when his company of the Fifth had ridden through where her village used to be. There had been a line engagement between several large battalions of Legion and Thalmor. She was one of a few dozen left on the verge of starvation, trying to rebuild houses from the burnt timbers of the buildings, eating every dead horse and dog around. They had been married formally by a Mara rustic making her rounds of the wasted areas of the tri-hold area, a shrine right there on the blackened ground in the company of those still healthy enough to attend, and the Watch men and women. She traveled from there with the Fifth and worked full time. His nerve hadn't roiled at the mention of his wife. It was the memory of their only child, a daughter who had died a little over two years before in a Fifth Watch raid on a Stormcloak shipping train over in the Pale. It was her armor, bow, saber, and orange crested buckler behind the bar on the stand.

Otherwise, they ate a honking beef and barley pie cooked up right there in front of them and drank too much Honningbrew mead from the barrel, letting the two legionnaires thoroughly outlast them before anyone could ask about a room. Denthryd was the first to wake up on the floor, head cracking, stumbled out at dawn to the stables and threw his forehead in the iced surface of a horse trough in the barn. He stood up and let the wind blow on his face, eyes shut until what normally would have been numbed senses returned just slightly from the fug. Suddenly the front door of the inn swung open and Wystan stumbled out, fell to one knee, got back up and ran around the side of the inn behind a snowberry bush. Denthryd was too hung over to laugh at the hurling. He woozed his way back inside the inn to one of the chairs where they had been sitting, absently sipping from a half tankard of mead. Azuyia slept soundly on the floor, curled up _. Must be nice to have an elf's metabolism_ , he thought _, boy are we gonna hear it in a couple hours._

"Morning, junior," the innkeeper smiled at him as he came down from upstairs, walking past and opening up the shutters on the front window to the room. Busying with collecting plates and mugs, he pointed at Azuyia. "Don't worry about the room rate, the tab here will do."

Denthryd nodded, trying not to look thoroughly wretched. Speaking of such, Wystan appeared at the doorway and walked even slower over to the table, sat down slowly, and put his face in his hands.

"Drink?" Denthryd offered the lees in his tankard.

"Oh, ff... you," Wystan started and didn't finish. Azuyia stirred on the floor.


	16. Azuyia Note One

4E 200 Sun's Height 29 4:56pm

Hi there, reader!

It's Azuyia. Presently, I'm listening to a 170s recording by one of Tasha's recommendations from the islands off of High Rock.

We've had a heat wave here in Falkreath, most of Skyrim from what I hear. Just carried a couple buckets to the tomatoes that I planted from a Valenwood trader in early Rain's Hand.

Sooooooooooooo ... whaddya think? I'm compiling my thoughts from the past two years in a book. Heh, can't exactly go to the guild scribners at this moment, septims a little short, but at some point I'd like to put this all on some fine vellum.

Cheers!


	17. Chapter 17

Received

Fletchersgate Field Post

4E 186 Sun's Dusk 22

Posted

Medicus Legio Honorem

Imperial City

Carl Ulia Swain House Eodsbury

Ca IC XIV S

You have been requested by Tribuna Marca XIV S veterana. _NON MORA_.

4E 186 Sun's Dusk 28 Nearing midnight

"Took your _lizard_ -arse long enough," she coughed through the spoonful of dark liquid the Kynareth medicus had just fed her.

"Doctor."

Ulia had nearly fallen off the last of the horses when she came to the stables at Imperial City's surrounding suburbs. She had ridden like a campaign, changed horses in towns and at courier stations as fast as she could since Falkreath, sleeping only on the stables ground to the astonishment of a few locals along the way, eating jerky and hardtack in the saddle. When she came to the first gatehouse at the end of the drawbridge, one of many on the island capital of the Empire, she gave the guard in brand new field plate only the letter with the red dragon seal, and was admitted across the bridge and through the city gates with no questions asked. A stabler was sent with her to the doors of the Legio Honorem.

She was greeted at the door of the civic temple by two robed Kynareth acolytes.

The elderly man tending to her, no doubt a retired devotee of great distinction to be serving here, took Ulia's arm gently and led her a little away.

"She is dying, _milita_ ," he gave the generic address for a legionary of any rank there in the halls.

"How ... long," Ulia said through her anaesthetizing fatigue.

"Soon."

"Thank you, _pater_ ," she said, handing him a gold septim in the traditional alms before he left.

Ulia walked over to the bed where Marca lay on a white cotton sheet wrapped in clean linens from her neck to her wrists and ankles, the same around her head. From the exposed face and hands, all the younger woman could see were thinner, older versions of what she remembered in the fields of Falkreath. Marca had distinguished herself in the Thalmor fight, and after nearly forty years of field service in Skyrim had been named military tribune in an honor detachment here in the City itself. Ulia had chuckled when hearing about that one twelve or thirteen years ago. _Her? At head of a parade battalion?_ The barroom toasts had gone on about the campidoctor eating the scions of spa society for tea, but, still and thusly, the Empire did need its _pompas_ and units to control them ... and actual field veterans to lead the units that watch the parade barricades, follow? So Marca had spent perhaps over a decade passing off the sniffish buffets and chats for incursions into every mess hall of the Guards Main for ale and brisket.

"How ..," Marca coughed and spat up, wiped her mouth with the back of a frail hand and then on the linen, "lonnng, uh ... "

Ulia leaned over her; she did not sit. "What, doctor? How long for what?"

Marca looked at her with the same dark, hard eyes even through the hollowed cheeks and labored breathing. "How ... long did it take ... you," she rasped.

"Five days, six hours, doctor."

The tribuna smiled.

"Falkreath to Bruma and then Cherrol, kept to the lowlands, had the jarl's map."

"Gooooddd," Marca smiled, "you havennn't gotten _sofffffffft_."

"No ... doctor. Started on a destrier, chargers at the border. Made seventy-five with four stops."

" _Leg-ionis_ ," Marca said as her eyelids fluttered.

"Doc ... doctor? Doctor," Ulia almost grabbed her hand.

"What," her former officer snapped with frightening strength from the sickbed. Her eyes opened back fully, and she looked right into Ulia's.

Ulia swallowed hard. _This woman is an Imperial, do not smile or cry_. "Orders, doctor?"

Marca smiled and lifted her left hand, pointing. "Go to my chest ... scrub," she breathed.

The smooth, pitted footlocker had XIV burned into its flat lid. On opening it, Ulia found a single item, the legate baton Marca had carried. She took it out and held it in the middle, parade style, and turned around to see the woman who had burned the dragon into her chest lying still with her eyes closed, completely motionless.

She felt the hand of another Kynareth on her elbow, this time an older woman with her hood thrown back to show a kind, tan face with deep lines and white hair in a bun. Ulia shook her head at whatever was said, she did not hear it anyway, and mumbled about the grand honor hall at the center of the building. The woman motioned gently in the direction of one open door out the Medicus and Ulia took steps towards it, wanting to look back yet forcing herself as if on a march through swampland, making it to a prayer alcove and collapsing to one knee with her hand gripping the baton, feeling the tears through the other that covered her face.


	18. Azuyia Note Two

4E 199 Last Seed 18 Morndas 7:53pm

Azuyia's Journal

 _Hi there, reader. It's me, your one and only guide to the fantastick world of all things Zuyi, ha, been on the road, got time to kill._

 _If you're reading this, I'm either passed on to the skies of Mara or perhaps ensconced in some corridor of shelves where they stack all the heroic stuff. Whatever. You might want to keep in mind that I've already learned a rune that will send you into the night sky and it's hidden in these pages, so if you don't have my permission to read this, put it down and walk away._

 _Now then! I'm happy to be here in Falkreath, finally. Still sore from the memory of all that riding in a crowded carriage across the high pass. Man! Could some of these Nords use a bath once a month? They call wood elves some name I won't repeat here, it means something about our skin. At least we don't stink like a fekn mammoth cheese gone bad six days ago! I'm at an inn here at a village they call Fletchersgate. Heh maybe because it's the first before you get to Cyrodiilic mountains guarded by highland archers. Some guy sitting here is trying to get me to drink Colovian with him. He thinks I'm impressed by the vintage and I remember the year it was bottled._


	19. Chapter 19

The lively trio was walking around another of the commercial district's packed boulevards.

"Hey, Wys," Azuyia tapped him on the shoulder, stopping as they were passing a long warehouse with a press of people talking vibrantly outside, most all of them with tankards and bottles in their hands, "what're those?"

"What," he stopped and scanned the crowd. Denthryd stood behind them. "Which do you mean," he laughed.

"No ... the statue-looking things. On either side of that door there." She pointed at two forged steel armatures attached to the building that curved upwards into a basket sconce, each holding a globe of milky glass with a curious figurine sitting on top. She wove through the edge of the crowd towards the door to the long building. Standing there almost pressed to the wall, they looked at one of the sculptures. It was exceedingly fine steel, the streamlined sconces. One usually saw cast iron lanterns hanging outside buildings, the grade that blacksmiths could turn out as fast as the ore could be smelted, and perhaps small braziers with fires if the area were clear enough to set them well away from the buildings. They looked weapons-grade, the curves of the sconce they stood under worked to the smoothness of a sword blade. It was more the strange glass globe that had caught her attention, the distinctive metal figurine posed on top of it most of all.

"What is this, Wystan," she asked, craning her neck to see as much of the sconce's surfaces as possible amidst a continuous jostling towards the door of the establishment.

"That," he nodded, "means this place probably hasn't changed hands any time recently." The glass globe flickered a bit even in the daylight. _Strange_ , she thought, _it has no openings_. Sitting atop the globe in a joyous pose, right hand extended outward and upward, the other clasping knee where she sat crosslegged with calves draped over the globe's surface facing the street, was the stylized image of a female elf tinted seafoam green.

"Does this," she pointed at the figure, "mean something? What's this building's business, anyhow?"

"Oh, that," Wystan explained, "no, that's only the mark of past times. You won't find many of those left out in the open any more, not those. Saw one in the corner of an antiquities dealer in Imperial City on one of those trips we took. Asked her what it was 'cause that one, too, sat there and flickered, and much brighter if it's sitting in half darkness. It's just art decoration that was major popular over eighty years ago."

"So they imagined elves sitting atop the world," she laughed.

"Oh I dunno, Zu," he shrugged, "those, hmm. Seeing those outside of a building, you're looking at what a lot of the city may have looked like during those times."

"How do you mean," Denthryd asked.

"Here, let's," he pushed back out and away from the wall, "see what's inside," he almost yelled. The street was as loud as it was packed. They got behind Denthryd, who most easily parted the last few steps to the door, and stopped when a gruff Nord man in iron breastplate asked for five septims. Wystan looked at them with a huge smile. "Its ... a ... mead hall," he said, turning to the man and paying, heading in without them.

 _Five septims_ , Denthryd thought to himself, _to walk in to a barrelhouse. Uuuhhhkayy_.

Having found three spots at the far end of one continuous table, they sat for a while taking in the scene.

Azuyia spoke up first. "So Wys," she downed the last of the preposterous tankard and said, "what's the story with all the old ... stuff? And what about those sculptures outside?"

"Those," he answered distractedly, eyes on an Imperial woman with shimmering magenta paint around her eyes walking by, getting his chin turned back in Azuyia's direction. "Hey, what?" He shifted his head to the side momentarily at her, continued, "The style is from the era of a jarl well before the ... cataclysm."

The other two stared at him on hearing this word, the unelaborated reference novices learned for the beginning of the schism with magic in Skyrim. Almost an entire hold, the one around the College, had drowned in a monstrous wave of some origin not related to them as of yet. Winterhold still stood on a promontory hundreds of feet above the sea with most of its original walkway and arch intact. The hold proper, though, had been decimated. Most of the population, certainly those nearest the inlet, had been lost forever and the noble house rebuilt on a paltry scale. Word spread across the country over the next generation, and Nords came to distrust anything with magicka, even blame it for their timeless problems to the point of scapegoating. The craft survived, though its organization had to remain in hierophant seclusion there on the one frozen rock looking out over the sea. From hearing Raynu tell the story in their study hall this past year, the distance didn't bother College masters one bit. They liked their quietude. _It's more the going out into the world, apprentices_ , she had told them, _that's going to test your ability to fit in. Don't expect free rounds like a legionnaire from a famous company._

"Is it magicka?" Denthryd broke their silence amongst the carousing and music.

"Yes. See the glint of light inside the glass sphere on it?"

"I did," Azuyia nodded.

"Well the story I got from the dealer in Cyrodiil that time, she told me that before ... current times there had been a jarl, right here no doubt, who had been quite the opposite of what we're used to. He had actively encouraged magic, all forms. Wanted the hold to attract visitors to rival Imperial City itself. They actually had a college, no, more like a guild here inside the city walls. Mages came from the entire continent to schmooze."

"Wow, different times."

"Yep. That glow you saw? That's a wisp cast into the glass and sealed there."

Denthryd and Azuyia's mouths dropped in unison.

"You're kidding! They ... " the Bosmer leaned her body across the table at him, indicating him to do the same, pulling Denthryd by the shoulder, "they decorated their buildings with the _dead?!_ "

"Dunno, sis," Wystan leaned back and looked over at the lines for drinks way across the hall. "It was definitely a freer time than these," he chucked his thumb over his shoulder, "sour years. They lit up the city with wisps. In coming years that kind of art got ripped down, disappeared from streets. Dibella knows what happened when someone busted open one of the spheres," he shivered slightly. "She told me the one in her shop was likely the only I'd ever see, and she was right up until now. She also said some cryptic stuff about the end of magic in this city. I don't think we'll find the guild house or any markers where it used to be, guys. And I wouldn't ask." With that, he got up and walked over to the lines up to the barrels.

Azuyia and Denthryd sat there, side by side, taking this one in and continuing to watch the crowd.


	20. Chapter 20

"What?!" Tasha yelled at the edge of the stage, "Can't fekking HEAR YA!"

With this the crowd overtook the drums. Tasha slung the guitar around the front of her body and began to play. The two Nords alternated turns at the main drum and seated drum sets as Tasha and the Dunmer played several super-tempo songs about living large in a wartorn land, dancing on the edge of death, keeping just this side of the jarl's laws, or galloping off ahead of a bounty.

After the initial Troupe originals, the quartet launched into a whizzbang of chestnuts and warhorses like _Age of Aggression_ and their interpretation of _The Dragonborne Comes_ harmonics. Gotta pay the bills.

Wystan, who had had some beginning lessons in the lute when he was a boy, started to notice, too, that Tasha was weaving in a whole lotta dissonant chords into these tavern faves, giving the songs a decidedly darker flavor if you listened over the heaving spectacle. He stood next to an ale stand as the sun went down, having found that magic spot in a festival where he could clearly see the performance called where nobody seems to be walking through.

Denthryd stayed on the blankets and took in the amazing panorama just down the hill, nipping at a clay bottle of some blood-igniting Argonian the fun vendor in the motley velvet cap sporting what looked to be giant bird feathers had sold him.

 _What in Arkay's name am I going to write to mom and pop about this in my next post at the courier's?_

Mental Draft, Letter to the Folks Composed on a Hill just above Chaos

Heartfire, 200, forget the day ...

Sitting here after sundown on the fields outside the city. Young lady named Thistle just

asked me if I'd seen that atronach.

Love, your collegiate son,

Den

Post to: Salmon Country, North.

 _Heh, enough of this. I'm probably never gonna see one of these again as long as I live_ , he thought, and took another shot, leaning against the pile of their three knapsacks. _Man, whatta day!_

Azuyia had climbed on top of a roasted rabbit plate and smoked pheasant-on-a-stick stand when the vendors weren't looking, the blitzed young Breton in the greasy smock had so many customers lined up she, and the Breton man about her age cutting fowl and hassenpfeffer as fast as he could at the wood stove, didn't even notice her. The crowd was so loud, too, you could barely hear anybody other than the few closest. She sat crosslegged on the wooden sheet above them and watched the stage. The Troupe had taken a break to disappear into a small tent behind the stage, those two plated guards standing shoulder to shoulder in front of its flap. People didn't get too close, but they did stand several paces distance, waiting excitedly and buzzing around.


	21. Chapter 21

Denthryd was sitting around after a fine cup of kafa that morning next to the cold hearth, smoking with his feet up on another chair when a loud knock came at the door. Azuyia had for some reason prodded them to rent a one-room cottage between Pompa Concorda and the capital one evening for their last days before returning to Southall, showing up in the evening to their rooms from business in the city she had not disclosed. It had been the most tumultuous Denthryd had ever seen, and besides they had been crabbing at each other from sheer tiredness, so he didn't press her on it. She said she was making last rounds of longtime Bosmer residents in the city, and would arrange the trip home on her way, riding off with the promise that she'd not push the mare further than the Whiterun stables. Denthryd wrote in his journal and sat around all day, happy to catch a nap, pensive about the plans the two of them had made after leaving Raynu in the city three days prior. He answered the door to two armed men in the afternoon. Starting, he blinked and tried to think of a greeting.

"Uh, yes?"

"Delivery for Lady Aciaea. She here?"

The man standing in front of him looked mid to late-twenties, sunburned skin, and in riveted steel plate from neck to knee, shoulder to forearm with leather riding boots and gloves. The other one, standing next to a wagon, wore the same. Both were bareheaded and had legionnaire's marks on their faces, although the armor was Nordic with no insignia.

"Lady ... um, no. No, she isn't? May I ... help?"

"Then you look after this, we have rounds to make," he said shortly, turned, and helped the other man lift a crate wrapped in burlap and secured with buckled leather straps. They walked the crate easily into the hearth room, glanced at him a moment, then at each other, chuckled, and walked out to the carriage. With that the headed east down the road. Denthryd looked at the table-sized wrapped cube a moment. It didn't have any shipping tag on it or trade markings of any. He sat down for a half hour or so wondering about their breezy appearance and departure.

He had gone for a walk after dinner downstairs there, per usual, and greeted a family of five staying the night on their way to Whiterun and their temple of Kynareth. They had seen, they told him, the miracles of a devoted healer, and had been directed for their daughter's more serious illness to the head priestess herself. Denthryd had spent altogether too much time brooding over the coming examinations that entire week. _No way I can stay here for a second candidacy, not happening_ , he thought walking past drying stalks of echinacea. When he walked in to the cottage, Azuyia had returned from her day.

"How goes," he started to say, pulling the robe over his head and pausing with it still on his arms as he noticed the open crate in front his seated colleague, "... it?"

"Evening, Den," Azuyia smiled at him from the table, dipping a peace of dark grain bread in a bowl of soup. The crate had been unwrapped, and its top lay on the floor in front of the table where the other two sat. Denthryd tossed his robe onto one of the two beds there in the hearth room and stared at the contents. There looked to be a full suit of plate steel armor with helmet packed inside.

"Is this what those guys brought earlier," he asked the obvious, not knowing what else to say.

"Yep," Azuyia said with her mouth partially full, "pull up a chair, brother. We have something to discuss."


	22. Chapter 22

Denthryd crossed his arms and replanted his feet. "I suppose there's some inner circle to this plan you're going to, maybe, let me in on, then? I mean, great. You can talk to magistra 'cause she's Boiche, and knows the grande dame because she's old enough, so what? _We_ are getting ready to finish the novitiate, Zuyia, and I would like to be there when it happens, and not in a Whiterun jail cell on suspicion of consorting with," he gestured and inflected the last word,

 _daedra worship_."

Azuyia looked up at him calmly. "And what do we do once we leave their kind fold, Den?"

"What?"

"What do we do once they've finalized our _two_ middling casts and alchemical recipes, what then? Apply for a minimum wage up at the capital? Sell wagonloads of wildflower by day, calm rattles in the afternoon, and work our fingers bloody all night in a hunting tent? Ever thought about what comes next?"

"Hadn't really thought about it. Just want to get through it. Alive."

She looked at her hands. "We have an opportunity right in front of us, Den. We can do this, go pass our exams, and be the first to land a real destination, a magicka destination, within the week. Think about it! They haven't told us shyte about where we really want to go. You want to spend the rest of your life wondering about it, or do it, play the game ... for real!"

Denthryd's left eye half winked as he raised the left side of his face skeptically. "That's a rousing speech. And here we sit. We are novices just about to finish two spells, Azuyia. That alone is worth keeping. This," he uncrossed his arms and pshawed at the crated armor, "drama you have in mind. What, exactly, do you think we're gonna get from her even if we do, singlehandedly, following our professional ensemble, effect her release? You think that Breton bard is gonna stick around longer than we can take a piss break?"

"Yes, I do, Den. Like you say, she's on trial for heresy and these are dangerous times. Most Nords— no offense," she started.

"Nooonne taken," he countered, tiredly.

"Don't like bards who sing much more than smashed skulls and yay-the-king as it is. Tasha Razrtip just channeled the Wild Hunt through a guitar and tore up an entire fiefdom. In the end, it has nothing to do with anything other than taxes and bylaws, but she's gonna get her head separated to appease that unnammed blood god called the mob. They're all tense and tired from a generation at war. They need relief from the fights at the dinner table, so this situation is focusing their attention on a tangible, colorful 'enemy.' Killing her won't settle with the Stormcloaks but it'll have the taverns singing _Age of Aggression_ until every other bard in the area loses their voice and a sanctioned, _taxed_ form of drunken revelry empties every barrel in the hold."

Azuyia was helping him straighten the breastplate and backplate before dawn on the last morning of their stay. She had paid in advance, gossiping with the innkeeper and acting the part of an enthusiastic partier out traveling with her boyfriend to festivals. They would need to slip out very early to pull it off.

"I feel fekking stupid, Zuyia," Denthryd grumbled, standing stock still.

"Oh quit yer," she said, running her hand behind her neck as she stood behind him, then walking in front of him. "Now let's see you walk. C'mon, now."

Denthryd gave her a surly look and affected a walk.

"No, no! Den, we need to practice this."

"I need to get changed, ah ... if you," she twirled her hand, and he turned his back in the exact spot where he was standing.

"Your highness," he said petulantly.

"We," she said from behind him, "need to walk out that door with an understanding, see."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes, Den. I know I'm keeping you in the dark, but if we're going to do this it needs to be all the way. Okay, you can turn around."

Denthryd turned and his eyes widened a bit. The lecture buddy had doffed the baggy robe and was now standing in a pearlescent white gown, a long, formal dress that reached her wrists and draped to the floor. The silk had gold filigree and green gemstones up and down the arms. She wore what appeared to be a thick gold chain around her neck with a cast medallion on her breastbone.

"Where did you ... "

"I went shopping, too. Um," she smiled slyly at him, walking over to her duffel bag and pulling out a box. She laid it on the table next to the glowing hearth and opened it. Its lid had a small mirror, and the body had an assortment of small vials and tubes. She sat down and took one of the tubes, pulled at the stopper, ran it across her lips. "Can you help me with my hair?"

"Are those emeralds?"

"Yes. Now hold the band, like this," she said pulling her hair back and up.

"And gold," he nodded at the chain with Bosmer casting.

"Yes, Den. Put your fingers through this ringlet, and ..."


	23. Chapter 23

Azuyia had been amused at the cultural shift from the more jaded urban quarters of Cyrodiil to the farmlands and wild areas of Skyrim. Seems to her there had been a bar somewhere in a small town not far from Falkreath. She had probably heard a quip from a saucy server about her fancy getup or a soused patron making a pass, and sat trying not to look like she was taking mental notes, this burned into the wall next to the knife-throwing target and a display of antique riding harness pieces, underneath one of those purpose built heraldic letters the capital likes to issue in sentimental tour guides, an R about the size of an Imperial shield splashed with the entire color wheel :

 _Ride your horse well, come tell us your tale_

 _Leave your horse brass, we'll fill up your ale_

 _Toss your meat pie, we might kick your tail._

 _Skyrim for Nords who ride and who draw_

 _Fletchersgate welcomes you to live our law_

 _Come to the 'R if dragons you saw._

 _Tell us your tale and leave us your tiding_

 _Tell only the deeds you should be abiding_

 _Or horse your bull and just keep on riding._

Some towns even had minor ordinances about inflating war stories. These bylaws seemed more crowd control to relieve the municipal burden of hearing out the two sides of a drunken brawl, those ones where one type of swagger tells another it's out of line, and tended to involve a small fine and elocution from a small panel of veterans in the town hall room devoted to eagle _s_ and memorabilia. Petty courts simply had no time to separate the two legionnaires who busted up someone's brand new cedar over the one who had not actually, personally, taken the Thalmor emplacement singlehandedly, nor did the Kynareths place much priority on the resulting broken jaws over the ailments people suffered through the natural aging process.

Blizzards, droughts, livestock epidemics, raids came and all needed every neighbor. Essentially, part of the fiber of Nord harmony was a sense of the value each product or service every citizen provided, however inglorious or commonplace. Azuyia had seen a prudhomme in rich overseas cloth stop to help an embarassed vendor right a barrel of aged cabbage after his mule had kicked it, before it completely turned over and lost its top to dump all over the ground, and guess what? That barrel of fermented cabbage is one more item in the area food supply. _Hmmm_ , she had thought on witnessing this, _a Thalmor in even the muddiest outpost might have had that vendor's head dunked in the spilled barrel if a drop of vinegar had splashed too close._

Not that Nords were always courteous or cheerfully glad to meet chipper young Bosmer novices out to discover the world. _Well? Who are you? And why are you out on the moors trying to get yourself killed?_

Azuyia wandered out of Deolli's house for a walk later in the morning. She took the wolf pelt that had been drying over the table and chair ever since she had arrived in Fletchersgate. Stopping a little ways down the street, she felt why Deolli had given her that smirky look just as she started out away from the front yard. This pelt was difficult to carry in an armful out in front, and couldn't really be bundled well on one shoulder (and she hadn't thought to find a cord of some kind to wrap it up somehow). _Sigh, yep, didn't learn this one in college either_. She pulled the pelt up behind her in a cape and held it across her shoulders with both hands closed, feeling a little warmth reach her cheeks as a few more villagers pointed and tapped each other on the arm. It was only down the first street and a right, then a walk on the raised boardwalk in front of the open cartwright's workshop and the milliner's storefront that she reached the gate to the spread out forge grounds. She needed the one hand to open the gate, so she threw the pelt over one shoulder and held it tightly underneath, pushed the latch, and walked in to the baked clay and gravel surface of the outdoor part of the smithy.

She walked over to Temur at one of the workbenches and let the pelt slump down her arm and held it draped over the crook of her elbow.

"Hey there," she began with a smile.

Temur was hitting a plate of silver with a cross peen hammer. "Hello," he said, looking up with the hammer paused on the metal surface. "More sightseeing?"

"No," she beamed, "actually, I wanted to talk to you about tanning."

"Not today. I've got work to do."

"Oh I know," she said, happy to be out talking to people for once since her sickness, in the fresh air just out and about, "maybe when you get a chance you could teach me about how to use this? I'd love to know how to use wolf pelts."

Temur smiled as he hit the silver. "Plan on doing the lone wolf thing again, I see," chuckling. "Don't count on Deolli standing over you for three more days if you do. She has five children, three about your ... well, three married and two getting on that way. And her husband," he looked at her askance, "died serving in a ranger battalion east of Markarth."

Azuyia let her head drop and looked at the ground a moment, then looked back up at Temur. "Okay, okay. You too? Do I have to listen to ... "

"I am making," he interrupted, placing the hammer on the bench next to the silver plate and pulling a dirty cloth from his front apron pocket, wiping his hands, "a fruit plate for the jarl's daughter on commission for her wedding in a little less than three weeks. This," he said, lifting the piece of silver and holding it vertically, then placing it back on the bench, "is to hold frozen Argonian cherries. And it will pay me enough to put a down payment on a house."

"Temur, I just want to learn."

The Breton wiped his hands again, and placed them in the front pocket of his apron. "Tell me, wild one, why I should waste time teaching you my stock in trade when I could be making money for my wife?"

"Well, I could help you around the shop?"

Temur snorted and smiled. "Oh ... that's rich."

"Hey, really!"

"And what do you plan on doing around here, hmm hmm? Demonstrating your exalted craft on some unsuspecting fork? Embedding an automatic tie on the latest fashion in scabbards?" He laughed and walked past Azuyia to a door in the smaller of two sheds near the smelter, opened it, and disappeared inside.

She threw the wolf pelt down on the ground and followed him in. Temur had a couple of terracotta jars open and was sorting through them.

"Alright. I get it," she said, annoyed, "you and everyone in this village is going to tell me what a softhanded little dork I am for collecting nirnroot without a tank bodyguard. Just get it over with!"

Temur had his back to her and did not turn around. He did, though, place his hands on the table. "How you choose to die is your business, Bos, but this is my business and my time, every minute of every day at that table out there, is valuable. I— "

"I understand that," Azuyia interrupted.

"No ... you don't," he said, turning around and leaning against the table. "See, the closest I, my wife, our friends, everyone I know here get to rolled pieces of vellum and bound pieces of paper with all that glorious stuff is a few vacation trips in our entire lives. If the gods grant us the peace and time aside for a carriage to Falkreath where we can stay at some house for a week and sleep till nine, stuff our faces with sweets and roll in afternoon delight we _might_ care a quarter-septim to see a buncha frilly paper under glass cases, and hear some ponce talk about them. Then we take our commemorative wooden medallion for the next thane on the back, happy that we have been _kulchured_ , and get on our way."

"Man ... "

"What? Expecting me to perk up at the possibility of helping you get your smithing ribbon?"

"I am not expecting advanced metallurgical ... "

Temur snorted and laughed some more. " _Advanced metallurgical_ ," he mimicked.

Azuyia stopped. "I know ... I will only ... be a complete ... beginner."

"Damn straight, pointy," he laughed.

"No need to be rude."

Temur's smile subsided. "You are not the only Bosmer here," he said, "but we _work_ for a living. You don't."

"Is that so? And you don't think college mages do anything at all to help in the war effort?"

The Breton's forehead wrinkled and his face pinched. "Name ... one."

"We," and at this Azuyia tried to find words. They stood there in silence long enough to notice the sound of someone else's voice.

"Hello? Hello? Shop open?"

"Be right there!"

"I ... I don't know how to explain it," Azuyia tried, "but—"

"Let me know when I'm smart enough to understand it," he said, pushing past her with his shoulder roughly brushing hers.

She stood there in the shed wondering what to do.


	24. Chapter 24

Denthryd sat on the porch with his head against the wall, dozing. Summers in this stretch of plains came on faster and lasted a lot longer than he was used to in the mountains of Eastmarch. By this time, since he was a boy, people would be in parkas and capes with at least the thinnest Alik'r silk underneath, those who still did not believe a slug of brandyand a laugh would save the fingers and toes from needing the saw. Yes, this sun made the hooded wool cloak a little hot and he contemplated doing what a lot of guys from this part of the country do, and doff his casting robe for a knee-length sleeveless tunic or a studded ranger's harness with the metal disc at the sternum, x-straps over the shoulders, and cuir bouilli skirt with the steel lugs punched through the leg guards, walk around basically barechested. Oh, the aching he'd get from Wys and Zuyi if he did, too. He sipped from a tankard of cold sweet tea infused with mint he had gotten to go from the Cock and Bull on his way back from a morning walk. Denthryd had never thought that the taste of something cold, for Talos' sake, would be so appealing in Last Seed.

"Stressing, as always?" he heard coming closer.

Denthryd opened his eyes, staying put with hands clasped across his stomach, leaning the chair back against the front wall. "Nuuuu," he answered drolly. It was Azuyia wearing a forage sack and carrying a bushy leather sheaf of mountain flowers.

"Ahem ... we did tell Ellmann we wanted to watch him make a frostbite poultice."

"Any farmboy from Eastmarch learns that from sand," Denthryd yawned, "I was only being nice to the old fogie, just wanted him to shut up and sell us the roots."

"I know you know the cold, Den, but maybe you don't know what he knows. Remember what magistra said."

" _Stay in the tower, lose any power_ ," he rolled his eyes.

"Yes."

"The only tower I ever set foot in when I was growing up the son of two salters was the watch a few clicks from my village with the rangers."

Azuyia's mouth shifted a bit to one side. "Why are you always such a smart aleck?"

"Like I say," Denthryd leaned foreward onto his elbows and letting the front chair legs rest on the porch boards, "I am the son of two fish salters, and I have never _been_ in a proper tower, so rest assured I know exactly what that lectern splash means."

"My town isn't a Summerset palace either, Den."

"Is there a point to this conversation?" He raised his voice, irritated, standing up and gesturing. "I am tired of flowers, roots, and fungi! He raised both arms with palms upwards, quickly, and let them clap his sides.

Azuyia phased off a minute to a conversation she had had with both parents a few years back before leaving the country. Then: "Okay, but what else is there to do while we wait here?"

"Hunt wolves?"

"Shut ... up!"

Denthryd slouched back down in the chair and leaned back, taking the mug of tea. He sipped, raising his eyes over the edge of the mug, and lowered to chest height slowly. Azuyia saw he was pointing behind her. When she turned around a very tall Nord woman in field leathers with a claymore strapped to her back stood looking straight at them with her arms crossed. She had a thick shock of bright blonde hair pulled up from her face behind a bronze and moonstone circlet pushed back above her hairline, and dark-bronze skin. An iridescent emerald tattoo ran from her right temple to above the eye, wound its way around the eyebrow and underneath the eye, and then down the cheek below her ear to taper off at the jaw. Not knowing the full story behind the symbols without being inducted into her particular field company, both Azuyia and Denthryd recognized the Nord practice of marking an experienced fighter. She had been blooded.

The woman did not look to be spoiling for something. It would have been difficult, the two novices thought simultaneously, to mask that with a build like hers. She was young, quite young, in the face, seeming barely twenty if that. Her arms and legs, though, had that sunburned and roughened look of a life spent sleeping on a stinking, wet bearskin bedroll and calling a few embers in the fire pit dug out of rocky soil a pleasant hearth. She had more of a ranger archer's body than the barges that often formed the center of a Nord column. That could change, though, in the next couple decades given she lived that long. The Nord walked closer to them, and they saw clearly in the daylight a pink scar running from above the left side of her mouth and down her chin.

If she fights with two hands, Denthryd thought, then that could have happened when she raised her blade to the right close in to an opponent with a short blade in the right hand. Maybe she was pushing with both hands around the hilt, rushing, either that or she got incredibly lucky at someone's downswing with an axe or longer blade. _Oh, who knows._

"I wasn't aware mom had visitors," she said to them in a surprisingly light voice. As she walked up to them, both saw she had eyes of the most astonishing purple hue, a dark blue-violet at least one of them had never seen in a Nord. Curiously, she also had fingernails painted silver that glinted in the sun.

"Um, hi," Denthryd replied, staring. Azuyia eyed him.

"So? Who are you," the Nord asked, striding up the three steps to the porch, unfastening her claymore and setting it down on the round table, lounging easily in the rocking chair by the railing. Denthryd said nothing and stared.

Azuyia cleared her throat. "Yes, we have been staying with your mother on and off these past several weeks. We're novices at—"

"I can see that," she replied without smiling, and not really that sort of almost menace Azuyia had seen enough, just not particularly friendly.

"Welll, see I had a little mishap out on the moor, bonebreak fever, your mom cared for me. I've never been so sick in my life."

"I see. And you are still here, because?"

Denthryd rolled his head to the side and upwards, letting out a sigh through pursed lips, and stood up to walk over to the railing and lean on it, facing out towards the street.

"Den ... Den," Azuyia said quickly, then turning her head back to the Nord woman. "Well, today we're visiting your apothecary Ellmann to study more frostbite medicine. That okay with you?" The Nord woman's face fell a little for just a moment, then she slowly started to smile.

"Of course," she smiled with lips parted and eyes closing to crescents, chuckling a bit, then saying, "I'm dying for company. In on four days' break."

"I'm Azuyia by the way, and my friend here," she stopped, clearing her throat again, "is Denthryd."

"My name is Ryvanni Winters, daughter of Deolli Winters."

"What does your surname mean, by the way, Ryvanni?" Denthryd asked later that night. "Your mom hasn't mentioned it." Azuyia was interested to know this, too, yet had been hesitant about whipping out the note pad and asking about regional Nordic dialect.

Ryvanni took a sip of ale and got a quizzical look on her face. Her eyes narrowed and she stared diagonally towards the ceiling with her head cocked to one side.

"We mean no disrespect," he added.

"Um, yeah," Azuyia chimed in, "just eggheads?"

The fireplace popped for a few minutes, long enough for two fannies to start shifting in seats. Ryvanni sat absolutely still. She ran her finger over the mug handle and breathed imperceptively. Denthryd stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the fire, squatting down and staring at it.

"Icebound," she replied, getting up and walking over to the hearth. Ryvanni reached over the mantle to an old wooden frame about eight inches deep at its sides, carved with Nordic tree emblems and long varnished. A scarred but oiled and shiny steel buckler hung in the middle. She lowered her head to look up at the underside of the top piece, removing the buckler, reaching up, then pulling the crimson mounting plaque away from the frame and setting it on the mantle. Ryvanni walked back to the table and sat down with the other two, holding the buckler across her lap. Behind the shield mounting there was another painted wooden plaque, this one deeply carved. "What I am going to tell you," Ryvanni started to say, slowly, "either stays in this room at this fire or leaves your dead mouths as your head leaves your body."

"Alright! I'm outta here!" Denthryd blurted, standing up from the fire and throwing his hands up, starting for the door.

"Den ... Den! Stop!" Azuyia yelled at him.

The son of two salters halted by the door, turned, and looked directly at Ryvanni. "I don't give two septims for macho-bravo, but you!" He raised a hand stiffly, pointing at her. "That was a threat!"

"Damn straight it was," Ryvanni stiffened, moving her right hand underneath the buckler. It took Azuyia's eyesight to notice that Denthryd's pupils had acquired a pinpoint of firelight.

"Cut it _OUT_ , both of you!" she screamed. "There is enough killing right outside that door!"

"Talos," Ryvanni muttered, putting the buckler on the table and getting up, walking over to the ale barrel, pouring a full mug and downing a good bit of it. _Wow_ , both of her conversation mates thought, _does she walk like a legionnaire_. So young and strong, and then a noticeable draw in her movements. "You're right. I'm sketched. You have _no_ idea what a week on a frontier line will do to your head." The novices understood, now, that neither a joke or a comrade's shoulder clap was in their range of polite responses, that sympathy might get you thrown across the room. They just stood there, waiting for more. She looked at them before finishing the mug. "That's a week on your feet without sleep." They nodded. "Winterwarp," she continued looking up at the plaque, "is a word that our family acquired at the end of the second era when peace was established by Tiber Septim."

"You're nobility," Azuyia said.

"Not so fast, sis. Like I say, my ancestors came from a tribe that lived literally on the northern coast. We're talking the ice floes. Mom has a scrimshaw piece out of horker ivory that's been in our family forever, barely lets me even look at it. It's okay, though. Like a lot of folk my kin have been uprooted, so every last memory is precious."

"I can understand that," Denthryd offered. "Windhelm."

Ryvanni gazed him a moment, then nodded a little. "According to the family stories I heard from my grandma and grandpa when I was little, my ancestors had served in Tiber Septim's armies. Yes, him. Talos. During the chaos of that time, one forebear, a woman named Veraxxa. You still occasionally find girls with that name in the really, really small villages of Skyrim, places where not every birth year produces yet another crop of _Tertulla_ after the emperor's third daughter. She had survived long enough to rise from country all the way to captain of a company. When the dust cleared and the dead were counted, the story goes that she was called to the mansion of the minor jarl whose estate her company had basically saved. At this time, I don't think anyone knows where that estate used to be or who that lord was, so much has been lost.

Mom still warns me about poking around about it. Dad did, too, when I was little. He told me to never go asking about our name, and I did not understand why. But the important part was that he wished to recognize her service in his keep, and he named her thane. The way the story has been handed down, apparently they were from two clans and spoke different languages, so gave her the fief of Winterwarp, _icebound_. Her company had many from the extreme coast, and they became known for their skill in surviving. They fought in deep snow when enemies weren't expecting raids for months. He gave her the entire coastal fief to settle her company and recognized her as Veraxxa, Thane Icebound."

Now neither Denthryd nor Azuyia had a sudden change of opinion or perspective on Ryvanni. She did not change in their eyes, but this story was one of those their college study had hinted at. Much was buried just under the grains of soil and newest wildflowers all over the country. The Aldmeri war had been only the most recent conflict to displace populations and erase centuries of folkways and traditions.

"Of course, obviously, the Winterwarp fief is no more on the shores between the ...Winterhold and Windhelm. Let's move this along," she exhaled, leaning on the mantle. "This emblem was carved right after the White Gold Concordat ended the war. Look at the style. Ever seen anything like it?"

"I have," Azuyia said.

"Oh?"

"Yes. I, of course, do remember the war. I was young and in school. The Thalmor reserve a special sort of hatred for elves not of their stock, we Bosmer and our relatives the Dunmer. They control the minds of the Altmer nation and indoctrinate them into thinking we are like animals who have overpopulated Tamriel. They hunt us. But enough, I can't think about that," Azuyia stopped, then recovering herself, "Right after the war there were refugees from Skyrim who had not found their place in Cyrodiil."

"That's right," Ryvanni nodded.

"I knew some of them. My own village had a couple of families who had made the trip all the way from Falkreath. It's why I wanted to come here, their stories. They said that, despite the service so many Nords provided to the Legion and its auxiliaries, Imperial City's establishment did not welcome them with open arms. Quite the opposite. Veterans without families or contacts ended up on the street, or worse turning to thuggery if they managed not to sell their blades for food. My family friend, ex-legionnaire, served in a horrible campaign in the far eastern Pale, we're talking spider stories, and he said that a couple thousand even camped on the capitol grounds and threatened to suit up and march. All well and good if you're not suffering from malnutrition and dehydration. Many were by that point into skooma and moon sugar to ease the pain of old wounds or the psychic traumas they had experienced, and many had taken to hard drinking. So needless to say all the ... Emperor had to do was call out some fresh guards, round them up, and they were never heard from again."

"My mother told me about that before I enlisted in the rangers. Didn't want to hear it," Ryvanni's face hardened, "but whoa, man, have I seen its fallout."

"What do you mean?"

"Part of your swearing in requires each new unit to go before a member of the Penitus Oculatus, the Emperor's special police force, and, one by one, enter a small room to sit and be told, specifically, that you are sworn never to raise a hand or by inaction ever threaten the life of his majesty."

"Okay ... but isn't that a part of every soldier's initiation?"

"Not like this, sister. When you're looking at an armed Oculatus, you know what you are being told. Obey or die, in a nutshell. And then we walk back out of that creepy room, suit up, ride off, and work our butts off in the same Talosforsaken reaches of this country that the Legion always has. Only at this point everyone kinda understands that discipline has an added, invisible layer. It's one reason why Nord soldiers don't trust magic. The only way the Oculatus could know everything it knows without posting a functionary in every last squad in every outpost ... is to _scry_." Ryvanni ended that last word with a hiss. Opening her eyes back up normally, she continued, "And you were saying?"

"Yes, yes," Azuyia replied, "the Nord families kept to themselves mostly, understandably. In Valenwood they were treated as unfortunate cousins. They were given permission to live, work, and trade under the same laws as any Bosmer. It was kinda funny watching Nords adapt to living in trees," she smiled, the smile falling fast as she noticed Ryvanni straighten up to her full height and cross muscular arms. " _Uh-hum_ , and their children attended schools with us. One of my best friends, Obju, was Nordic."

"Obju?" Ryvanni asked.

"Not a Nordic name, I know," Azuyia explained, "It's a common Dunmer girl's name, actually. Her mother, Riray, had died in childbirth before they got to the border. Doesn't happen as often these days, but like I say her parents had made the journey all the way across Cyrodiil on hard rations, living off of what little coin they had saved from her work in the town market and his military pay. Her father, Tomar, the one who had fought in the Pale, grief took him down badly. He would disappear for several days. Sometimes we'd find him passed out and barely alive. Several of us, myself included, as you know I was already fully grown physically, took turns looking after the baby. Well, one in particular also started to keep track of him, make sure he ate, started staying in his house full time. Her name was Obju, a Dunmer who had emigrated from Morrowind ... seeing as how _some elements_ of Windhelm don't particularly care for dark elves... " she trailed off, looking at Denthryd.

"Hey, don't blame me, Zuyi," he retorted, "for those elements who didn't adapt to change after the war. My mom and dad fought in the auxiliaries and returned to a village completely destroyed by five winters. They had to start over from scratch with a little goddamn septim in their pockets. Fish salters didn't build the Windhelm ghetto. We work sixteen-hour days to bring food to that place."

"What's this, then," Ryvanni asked, turning her gaze from Azuyia to Denthryd, and back again.

"The Nords in the city of Windhelm," Azuyia replied flatly, "want the Dunmer gone. Permanently. They refuse to sell decent property in the city to them, make all kinds of petty statutes. Your typical Windhelm roughneck blames the Dunmer for the economic recession that hit that city after the war, and one that hasn't much been relieved. Never mind that it's just about as far from the Hammerfell and Elsweyr overland trade routes as you can possibly be, and you're not going to find that many Khajiit or Redguard shipping companies willing to risk the kind of perpetual winter gales off the northern coast, not with Hammerfell's view of the peace treaty either. You will find my kind among the Bretons, Argonians, and Nords that sail in to that port, and I suppose the local toughs don't much notice since sailors tend to stick to sailor bars and sailor amusements. And they spend their coin doing it. So ... as Den points out, the common Nord in Eastmarch has a very bland diet and a narrow choice of occupations to take his or her mind off the fallout from the war.

Anyhoo, Tomar rejected much of his Nordic heritage. It was part of his process Obju oversaw as she nursed him. He kept his first name, I believe it had been his grandfather's, but he threw away his surname which I was never told. Obju had a Dunmer surname. Fiolitan. The time they spent together, as is quite natural for people who meet in extremis, found them falling in love. He asked her to marry him, and she accepted. Yet the story goes from what my friend Obju— heh, in Cyrodiilic I'd suppose you'd call her Objulilla— told me, he asked her to accept one unorthodox condition as they made their plans. He asked to take her surname, and name his daughter after her.

The younger Obju grew from an infant to a teenager right before my eyes. That phrase from common Nordic best fits what you would see as a Bosmer. She entered my school, and we became close friends. She's ... the senior adept at Southall Collegium now. So I was invited to stay with them quite often. Tomar was a carpenter by that point. He knew how to make cabinetry and furniture, and their family lived comfortably. I remember some of the tracery on the things he made for their home looking like that," she pointed up at the plaque, "with that sort of color scheme. I also noticed he never made anything with these markings for sale in the shop."

"I see," Ryvanni responded. "Well, then from what I know of Windhelm you really ought to listen to this next part. This carving represents my family in the current era. My grandfather made it when he got back from his tour fighting the Thalmor. Had a lot of time to sit and work on it," she paused, "since he lost his right leg below the hip. Gangrene. Filthy Altmer broadaxe went straight through his cuisse and hit the bone. It was in a flight and he was lucky to have been lashed to a horse, otherwise I would never have met him. You can imagine what immobility does to someone used to moving all his life."

"Definitely," Denthryd replied.

"Right," Ryvanni nodded. "So he worked at a bench in the wainwright's barn at the other end of town. It's still there, you've probably passed it. The grandchildren still own and run it. Grandpa was no journeyman in that regard, he had probably just learned how to fix a wagon's various parts enough to get supplies and wounded where they were going. All legionnaires have to learn bits of many trades. He passed the days sanding spokes and sawing parts; he could prop himself up at the work bench and do light work. I know, I used to bring him baskets of ale and cheese from grandma, and he'd sit me on his knee and talk with me." Denthryd thought he saw her eyes go a little glassy, but then: "He would bring home extra wood pieces from the shop. I'd sit next to him after dinner and watch him carve with his wheelwright's chisels very slowly. I loooved the smell of the pine and cedar. That," she motioned to the plaque, "was one of the pieces he made. It represents the Winterwarp lineage."

"Grandpa and mom were not entirely in agreement about how to face the end of the war. Grandpa, he had already survived fighting a long time before the Aldmeri conflict. The White Gold Concordat, though, made grandpa just as angry. I only saw it as a young child, but once or twice he'd get a little in his cups and start swearing about Imperial hypocrisy. It made an impression since his helmet and armor were always there on a stand in the corner, oiled, ready to go. A few years ago, mom sat me down and told me about this carving. Not too many people know what it means, but we keep it covered with the buckler just in case." At this, Ryvanni drew a deep breath, removed herself from the fireside, and paced a bit with her hands on her hips, looking at the ground.

"Yes?" Denthryd asked.

"Den ... not the time," Azuyia said.

He gave her an exasperated look.

Ryvanni stopped and fixed her gaze on the two of them. "It's a Stormcloak graph."

 _Oh dear_.

A loud sigh, sort of, came from upstairs. Something hit the wall with a thump, and then another, then another, smacked a surface hard, then another smack.

"What in ... what's that," Denthryd wondered, "do they keep a pack of hounds up there, or what?!"

 _This is gonna sting_ , she thought. "That's Ryv and her boyfriend," Azuyia answered, getting up to turn around and hide her smile while walking over to get more soup. She ladeled the stuff slowly into her bowl, taking her time to replace the lid and turn back around, keeping her gaze above his head as if looking at the wall behind him. _Yep_ , she thought. Denthryd was trying very hard not to look dispirited. He sat still with his hand on tops of his legs, hidden at the wrist by the table but Azuyia suspected they were balled pretty tightly.

When the smacking and thumping (and sighing, which was really gasping) had stopped for a while, the two of them saw a Nord man with a ringed red beard appear in the doorway from upstairs. He wore only a waist tunic of yellow muslin and had a lit pipe clenched between his teeth, sticking rakishly out the left side of his mouth. Azuyia found herself concentrating so as not to lift a hand to her head for any reason. The guy was enormous, easily twenty stones weight, even taller than Ryvanni, forehead and under both eyes in indigo ink, and as he walked over to the ale barrel and filled two of the bigger pewter tankards from the shelves next to the mantle, gripping them in one hand while grabbing the fresh loaf they had just bought. They also saw a red and black Imperial dragon insignia blazoned from his trapezius to the middle of his back. Whether it was the bread or something else, the guy looked at Denthryd as he walked past to go back upstairs.

"What?"

Azuyia conscientiously sipped spoonfulls of soup, looking at each spoonful. _Probably shouldn't give him the other-fish pep talk right now_ , she thought, the major accomplishment that she could actually keep the soup down without snorting it through her nose in laughter.


	25. Chapter 25

4E 201 some time in Mid Year before the afternoon mail courier

Azuyia sat at the table in the Winters household while a pot of vegetables in herbs simmered over the fire. She had also put on a pot of water to boil for tea. Ryvanni appeared at the door right on schedule.

"Afternoon!"

"Hey you," the Bosmer said to the glowing ranger, in from a forage walk.

Ryvanni loosened the shoulders of her pack and set it down on the floor next to the door, walked over to sit down at the table. "Something smells great! You been to the market, hm?"

"Yeahs, got some carrots and onions, sprig of fresh sage. Get this. There was a vendor

through from Hammerfell, getting his way on to Winterhold. Had trunks lined with metal, filled with ice."

"Sweet," Ryvanni said, pulling her hair back.

"Ohyeah. In that pot," Azuyia leaned forward a bit, "tomatoes. And rosemary."

"Hmm," the ranger said, eyes off, getting up, "'v had it before." She walked up the stairs to her bedroom.

 _Should I do this?_ Azuyia sat there for a few minutes.

She was sitting at her dressing table in front of a small mirror propped against a wooden collection box, changed out of her leathers and boots into a long cotton shirt embroidered with blue and pink flowers.

"Yes," Ryvanni asked as she daubed at her face.

Azuyia walked over and put her hand on Ryvanni's shoulder. "Your mom make this for you," she rubbed one of the flowers.

The ranger continued to apply things from small bottles across her lips, on her cheeks. They were not cosmetic colors, more lotions and oils with natural earth tones. She did not respond. Closing her lips and rubbing them together, she picked up an ivory hair brush and pulled it slowly through her hair, downwards on the left side.

 _She's practiced that toss_ , Azuyia thought, but better not to say something quite yet.

"Listen, Ryv. I wanted to tell you something."

The ranger stopped brushing and sat with her hands in her lap. Her eyes met Azuyia's in the cloudy mirror on the table.

"What?"

Taking a slight breath and moving to sit on the edge of Ryvanni's bed, Azuyia put her hands in her lap, too, momentarily, then raised one hand palm up, briefly, as she began.

"Iiiii ... I've been going to your stream pool, too. The one next to the little cliff west of town."

Ryvanni turned and looked at Azuyia briefly, then resumed brushing her hair. "So?"

Expecting different response, the Bosmer continued, "Heh, okay ... I followed you one day when I first got here. Just curious. It's a beautiful location! I ... "

The ranger put her brush down with a _tack_ and spoke towards the mirror. "Is there a point to this? I reallllllly enjoy my leave time to myself, see."

"I know, I know. I don't mean to bother. I just wanted to ask you something."

"About?"

"Heh," Azuyia stalled, "since that day I've been sneaking off when Den and Wys are at their stuff, and you're with your mom or something. I like to bathe and lay out, too," she said, standing up and walking over to Ryvanni. "Which is more important to you, Ryv, a bath or a tan?" She put her hand back on the ranger's shoulder.

"What kind of a stupid question is that," she retorted, combing her hair a little harder. "What's it to you, huh? Can't a girl have some time to herself?!"

"It does have to do with those dyes," Azuyia grinned slightly, "that give you the platinum."

Ryvanni rolled her eyes and scoffed.

"No ... wait. I don't want beauty tips, and I don't care about yours. This is something else."

"What!"

Azuyia lifted her shiny hair up and pulled it behind one ear, keeping the tip of the ear in her fingers. Ryvanni looked her dead in the eye, set the brush down precisely and kept her hand on it. She bit at her lip slightly.

"Please. Talk to me."

Ryvanni pushed her arm away roughly enough to have her take one step back.

"Ryv! Please! It's me. I just ... "

" _You have no idea_."

"Yes, I do."

"You are not Nord! You do not know what I've been through."

"And you are not Bosmer. No Nord can understand what we've suffered from the Thalmor."

"My grandfather DIED ... "

"I know he did."

"Then how can you _possibly_ say they don't understand?"

"They? You mean your fellow Nords?"

Azuyia saw rage and fear in Ryvanni's face as she said this. Up until now, she had never felt anything less than a jostling comraderie when the ranger got into her cups over dinner and others from the rangers or the Ninth were around, that and the ribbing about _dwemercraft_ and such.

"Don't play with me, mage," she said at her lowest register.

"Hey," Azuyia waved her hand side-to-side in Ryvanni's face, "it's me? Your friend?"

Another stare.

"Okay," the Bosmer shrugged, "I'm Mer, Mer-folk, right? If you were one amongst a crowd of Bosmer wouldn't _you_ be able to spot ... it?"

Ryvanni's face trembled slightly.

"Hey," Azuyia stepped forward and held Ryvanni's right arm, "it's okay. It's o-kay."

A tear dripped down the ranger's face, and she shrugged Azuyia's hand off, stood up with her back turned.

They sat downstairs later.

"How did you know?"

"Like I said, if you were in a crowd of Bosmer, say all wearing hooded cloaks or armor, wouldn't you be able to spot a Nord? Or a Breton or Redguard?"

"Welllll," Ryvanni sighed and played with her spoon in the bowl of soup she handn't touched, "Nords tend to be broader across the chest and heavier."

"And both Bretons and Redguards have skin that could be mistaken for ... Mer, in some cases."

"Yeah."

"I mean subtler things. Movements, vibes, your blood tells you."

Ryvanni turned her head. She had been doing this for much of their conversation.

"You could spot a human in Valenwood, right? Especially with your training."

"I suppose so."

" _Civia_ ... for starters, you're the only Nord I've ever met with eyes that shade of purple. I mean, occasionally you see someone with a sort of lilac. Yours is ... unique to my experience."

"You have no idea," Ryvanni replied bitterly.

"Of what?"

"Growing up I got it. Made fun of. Picked on, heh although only occasionally," she said, stirring at her soup, "stared at. Oh yes, and hit on. A lot."

"I'll bet."

"You think," she turned with a bit of a scowl, "I _liked_ it? I mean growing up is hard enough ... "

"No ... I mean, it's your blood they sensed. They just didn't know what it was."

Ryvanni looked up at an angle, taking a breath through her nose. "Hm, right. Then my skin."

"I know."

"Heh," she put down the spoon and walked back upstairs, returning with a miniature mauve glass bottle with silver stopper, "my company calls me _Regalia_." She screwed at the bottle, and pulled the stopper out with its miniature brush. "Learned this," she said, resting one palm on the table and daubing the silver paint on her clipped fingernails, "from a prostitute in the crossroads camp at north post, not far from Pompa. She also taught me how to dye my hair."

"Would it have been so different from your mother's?"

Ryvanni continued on her nails without looking up. "It would have been slightly blue-green just like my skin." She concentrated on the paint.

"That why you lay out so much?"

"Yes. I've spent a lot of time since I was little either laying out or acquiring Cyrodiilic bronzers. I can catch a tan very fast, and I discovered when I was young that it doesn't catch a ... human's eye, not all that much. I've once or twice gotten a look from a magic type, a non-Mer that is, but they ... heh, _you_ guys don't seem to mind," she looked up and smiled ever so slightly, blowing her nails.

"Mages come from all over, even overseas so no, we don't much care."

"Problem is," Ryvanni continued on her other hand, "Nords do. Remember ... my ancestors are Eastmarch and Winterwarp."

"So that doesn't overrule the ... I mean what does a St ... "

Ryvanni interrupted her. "The Stormcloaks are the cause of that the same way the Thalmor get common Altmer to murder Bosmer. It's blind hatred from ignorance and privation. I can _never_ tell a Stormcloak that my father was Dunmer. At least I didn't get the ears, not much at any rate. I always thought they were ugly."

"It would take Mer-kind to even think of it, Ryv. To a human you just have 'exotic features,' right?"

"That prostitute said the same thing."

"You know it wasn't your looks that tipped me off."

"What, then? My sparkling personality," Ryvanni joked airily.

"It's the rage. Something far more than your mother's stories could account. Like I said, it's Mer blood."

"Dunmer."

"Yes. Our neighbors, the folk from Morrowind, you know they have a ... tendency, a combination of physics and magicka running through them. It translates to 'ancient rage' from the Bosmer I learned as a girl."

" _Ancestor's Wrath_."

"Have you ever been told your skin is a little warm?"

Ryvanni finished her nails and blew on them, holding the one hand up in front of her face, assiduously performing the manicure ritual by screwing the silver stopper with the delicate twist that to a discerning eye says she could crush the bottle in her palm.

"The prostitute was Dunmer."

"Oh, I'm so sorry, I ... "

"Don't be," the ranger tossed her mane, threw it back, and pushed the inlaid circlet over her hairline, "don't be sorry for her or any of Dibella's workers in the camps. They know what they're doing. She showed me how to distract anyone from anything, including a half-Nord."

"I meant ... hm, never mind. But about that heat. Has it ever, well, come out? In battle?"

Ryvanni leaned forward and set one elbow in the other hand, rubbed her chin.

"I've seen it used once," Azuyia continued, "a Dunmer in our town stood between his wife and a scum Thalmor sergeant. Fried the bounder's face off."

"What happened?"

"You know, constabulary hassling the village, getting fresh to put it politely. My neighbor disappeared afterwards."

"I can," Ryvanni said slowly, "use it a bit. Found out a long time ago."

"Go on."

"I was twelve. There was this ... guy in the neighborhood."

Azuyia felt in her stomach what she was about to hear.

"I told him to stop, and since he was not going to ... it came out of me, the flame. Burned him. When he screamed," the ranger's voice hardened, "I grabbed his knife." She sipped at her tea. "Nobody suspected me, given the type of wounds. I just had to," sipping again, "put up with acting like a scared kid and all their cakes and teas, _there there_. All I wanted to do was kill. For a _while_."

Azuyia looked at her and said nothing.

"I can control it, though," she smiled, "I practiced. Got so good at roasting wolves that I started bringing the singed hides and racks of meat into town. Made a cape with a big wolf's face as the hood, heh, brought smoked legs to parties. Didn't have to deal with any players much, although didn't get any dates either," she laughed drily.

"Did they laugh when you joined the Legion?"

Ryvanni beamed. "Yes, they did."

"It's not completely unheard-of, Ryv. I grew up around mixed friends."

The ranger went quiet.

"That's easy for you to say."

"Easy? Why does everyone think that a comfortable Greenheart home is like Sovngarde-on-earth?"

"I didn't say Sovngarde, Zuyia. I meant that you know who you are, you were born knowing it. I'm neither Nord nor Dunmer. I'm both. I go to Morrowind, they see a Nord. I tell anyone in the Legion, all they think is Dunmer. When I walk in a pub, they see a Dibella in armor with pretty purple eyes."

"Kar doesn't think that."

Ryvanni laughed heartily. "That's because a human cuirassier might live to see thirty. Besides," she said craftily, "he's the only man ever beaten me with his fists."

"What?!"

The ranger winked at her slender friend. "On the training ground, silly."

"Oh, right," Azuyia half-rolled her eyes, tossed her hand.

"I caught him looking at me when the Ninth was in the area a year or so ago. I had been sent from the Rangers station with a message for their company tribune. Walked into the forum, and there he was with his brothers ... and sisters, if I might add. Got a wolf-whistle or three as I headed into the tribune's tent. Do we have any wine?"

"Um, no, but we could go get some."

"Hm, later. I walk back out, and the calls continue. See, heavy cavalry aren't known for their manners. And that's saying something in the Legion. They tend to roll in and do as they please, heh, they also stink like donkeys. Where high command gets that lot, who knows. Your typical woman in the Ninth bloody prefers her horse."

Azuyia smiled into her tea.

"I dunno. I _do_ know that my Regalia act gets this sort of thing, that's the price I pay, only that day I was in a bad mood, I forget why. So I catch Kar looking me up and down when I pass, making some comment to a horsefaced _vahy_ next to him, and I call him out on it. Six-nine, twenty-some stone, no problem, _boy_."

Azuyia hummed a few bars of _Our hero, our hero_ to a wry look from Ryvanni.

"So I call him 'boy' in front of his crew and challenge him to a barefoot match on the sand," she smiled broadly, "and we damn-well almost killed each other."

"I've heard," Azuyia pointed upwards to a giggle.

"We're equal on the mat, different styles but complementary moves. The Mer blood makes me faster than a Nord my size, his frame absorbs that many more than mine. And _Akatosh_ can he land a roundhouse kick. Wouldn't have expected it."

"This something you do often?"

Ryvanni gave her a look. "Thank you, no. We train together when we can. Hoo-WAAH you shoulda seen the centurion's look when they stopped us. Both of us had blood at that point. We got a lecture from the tribune about inter-company relations and a reminder about the rules to unarmed challenges," she motioned a yawn with her palm.

"And these rules stipulate what, exactly? You know he coulda used a battle cry on you, too."

"Oh, I know. That's why I went to bed with him and rode his brains out," she arched her back and stretched, rubbed her stomach.

"Puh- _lease_!"

"Why," Ryvanni stood up and shook Azuyia's face, compressing her cheeks, "can I not tell my widdw friendy-wendy about hot sex? Did I mention _sex_ , hmm? _Sex sex sex!_ "

"Would you," Azuyia pulled her face gently away from her friend's hands, "get over yourself. You remind me of my sister."

"Oh good! I'd love to meet her."

"And ... Legion regulations, and?"

Ryvanni grinned and pulled the other chair closer, sat down close to Azuyia. "Anyway! Challenges may only be made within a company, not between members of, say, the Ninth Cuirassiers and the Falkreath Rangers, and only carried out in the presence of an officer within said company. They were all just milite rankers, and I was from outside. The rule," Ryvanni continued, "keeps old grudges between units from becoming armed engagements. See, you get one company of Legion infantry has a beef with a unit of cavalry, or maybe some spitpolish puffers from the City and roughriders from the southern steppe. Remember my brother is a centurion in the Guards IV Main, a _centurio pilus prior_."

"Which cohort, might I ask," Azuyia inquired.

Ryvanni looked at her with surprise. "Dainty magelet, you know your Cyrodiilic."

"My last name was adapted from it. House Greenheart has strong ties to Imperial City."

"More on that. Since you ask, he's pilus prior for II Cohort, a command of four hundred eighty, not bad. The primus of any first cohort tends to be at least in his late thirties, and more often than not an Imperial."

"Yep."

"Royt. I've heard that the Imperial top-percenters don't think much of the Falkreath Rangers. He has to bite his tongue as much as I do, combs his hair in one of those tacky fly-forewards with the oiled curls, even dies it with charcoal. Otherwise, well, he'd look like my mother and father. All blond and shaggy. At least he got the brown eyes."

"Were there, well, I dunno how to ask this, others among your brothers and sisters?"

Ryvanni took a minute to answer. She pulled her soup back over and took a few mouthfuls.

"You mean by my Dunmer father," she asked as she blew on a spoonful.

"Yes, that's what I mean."

"You can understand why I don't want to discuss this often, or with anyone much at all. No, I was mom's only child with him. That's the part took her until I hit puberty. I think she had noticed my odd actions, and it had always made me wonder why she never said a thing about my wolf-girl style. Truth is my Nord dad came home to find mom with a tiny baby that looked completely different than his other children."

"Must have been hard for them, the whole situation."

"Yeah, like I told you," she continued, "it had been. She had nursed and brought up others already with him gone. My biological father was just a commoner, a migrant deciding whether to live the rest of his life in Skyrim or take the boat to Solstheim and on to the current Dunmer nation. I don't know much about that place, though."

"Haven't been, but seems our western neighbors traded one country destroyed by the Red Mountain's eruption for another equally desolate place. Solstheim, from what they teach kids in Greenheart, is both a volcanic desert and a bitterly cold island off the extreme northeastern coast. You have to take a ship from Windhelm to get there."

"Hence the hard feelings among Nord dockworkers."

"More complex than that, as you know, but yes, part of the mix."

"Hmm, well," Ryvanni replied, "mom has never even told me his name. I asked not too long after ... the incident, the time I found out the flame. I had to. I had known since I was a little girl that there was something different about me, and I was becoming a woman. She only told me that he had been working in the village and staying wherever he could. Said he'd stopped one day and merely said 'hello.' You know how it goes."

Azuyia looked off, said nothing.

"Seems they took to each other for a spell. Get it, a ... oh _nevermind_. It's one of the reasons I hate that bitch Vylonna Yaj next door. She ... saw it happening. My mother has never been anything but an honest, hardworking Nord!"

"I don't think anyone, _any_ one thinks otherwise. These have been hard times for most folk. Nobody cares."

"I don't mean it as a refrain, but it's different. In a village there are no secrets, and reputation has a meaning altogether separate from the guilds or royals. She _was_ the subject of some gossip and a few unkind stares at the pub, and she didn't deserve it. Apparently, my father left quickly at her asking."

Azuyia shrugged. "You're right. Valenwood just doesn't have the same social traditions."

"Hm, yes," she sighed, "so mom worked on. She was still months away from hearing of dad's redeployment here to Falkreath when she realized she was pregnant. Dad apparently said nothing when he walked in their bedroom and saw me in the crib. She claims, and I have never doubted her, that he even held me and helped change me."

"There may have been affairs with him, too."

"I know, as I'm sure she did. Seven years away at war. Like I told you before, she's never spoken ill of him, and yet I don't think they were ever truly happy after he returned. Still, they were together until he was stationed in the west. We apparently had a good run on the harvests for several years. I don't remember him, so I have never known either of my fathers, Zu. The man I grew up with as my dad was just one of her close friends."

Her face was contracting, and she turned her head. Azuyia put her arm around Ryvanni and they sat there as the evening sounds drifted in.


	26. Chapter 26

They realized Tasha was standing down below their camp staring at the vertical side of the hillock, looked at each other, shrugged and said their idunnos, walked down the easiest path to their right. She didn't turn or move as they approached, looking at the oddly chopped hillside. Just another bump in Skyrim's steppes, yet this side rose at a near right angle from the grasses rolling out and stretching in all directions, dotted with small rocks and boulders. There also was an exposed rock face behind the grasses and roots growing up and around it, down from above it, medium gray shale it appeared.

"Don't ... move," Tasha intoned carefully.

"What," Azuyia asked, stopping casually along with Denthryd and Wystan.

Tasha slowly held up a very long arrow with earth clumps on its head in her left hand. Her right hand was across her body on the handle of the katana at her left hip.

"Wha?!" Wystan exclaimed.

Azuyia turned and put her hands around her eyes, scanned the countryside around them. Denthryd had his arms folded and stood looking at the hillside.

"It hit near me when I had been down here a few minutes," Tasha continued, "landed almost on top of my foot."

"Think it's this," Denthryd motioned, walking towards the piece of exposed rock, "I mean ... "

"Don't!" Tasha dropped her left arm and lunged at him, jerking at his left arm.

"Hey, easy!"

"Where," Wystan asked, shifting and gazing around like Azuyia was, "could someone be hiding?"

They had been on open steppe for the third day in a row. There had not been any structures after leaving the hold proper, and would not be forests until they came to the foot of the mountains in farthest Whiterun. It was easy to travel on foot in the middle of Heartfire, this stretch, and other than around five stone of supplies on their backs, mostly food and water, far easier than huffing it up and down a high caravan route or even better through snow. Raynu, as always, had wisely applied torch to fannies and gotten them going before the autumn rains started. They, three of them at least if you didn't want to assume the bard's thoughts, were having a large time making camp pans of jerky stew in wild sage and salted fatback, sipping from trail tins, smoking and carrying on at the campfire. _Who's babysitting whom_ , Tasha had grumbled to herself, always standing the middle watch, listening at the rustles through the indigo darkness through the tall grass. It was just past the Heartfire new moon.

The most momentous occasion since their departure had been their sighting of a bear making its way through the field off in the distance. Other than that, not a living soul other than an eagle crying or elk in groups usually smaller than ten, grazing, starting if they came too near. So then, _blam!_ Vacation ended.

"You say it hit near your foot," Azuyia asked Tasha.

"Yes."

"Did it hit something, there? A stone? I can't see."

"No, right in the ground just before I stepped on it."

"But that's impossible!" Wystan started to look just a little scared, movements getting erratic.

"Stop," Azuyia turned to him, then asking Tasha as she set her gaze in the direction of the dark green strips rising out of the dying grass and goldenrod up the southwestern mountains, "so you pulled this arrow out of the ground from an angle?"

"Why would someone," Denthryd began.

"Listen! So there's no rock there next to your knee?"

"No. Not a one. The damn thing came from above us, guys."

Azuyia walked around the three of them towards the exposed stone on the flat hillside. Ignoring Tasha's rush towards her, not struggling as the bard's rough grip pulled at her around her neck and waist.

"Tasha ... Tasha, stop!" The Bosmer stood there calmly. "Listen to me! I'm not going to _touch_ it!" She felt Tasha's arms slide away hesitantly, turned and looked at her and at the two other novices. "And there is no cover for a shot like that. We may as well see what is so important about this," she turned around and pointed, then letting her hand clap down against her side and facing the other three again, " _inscription_."

"Okay, ohKAY!" Wystan's voice shook. "You're telling me that ... arrows from the _sky_? What!"

Tasha crossed her arms. Denthryd made no motion and looked grave.

"Cool it, Wys," Azuyia snapped, "crying about it won't help. No. At least I don't think so. Oh, I don't know!" She threw her hands, frustrated. "Let me see that," she pointed to the arrow in Tasha's hand. The bard handed it to her with a blank look. Azuyia wiped at the head carefully with the yellow and magenta festival banner in a gloved hand. It was longer than the shafts she had seen out the tops of the open Watch although the wood was thinner. She raised the arrow out in front of her with hands below the head and feathers, tried to bend it until she let out a breath. "Not oak, yew, spruce ... not a grain I've ever seen before," she said, examining the head. "Can't make out if," she sniffed at it, "it has any poisons on it, so don't let the points break your skin." She extended the arrow out with one hand so the other three could get a better look at the head. It had downward barbs from just below the tip and a secondary set of barbed blades starting at the head's flat surface just below the main point, thinner, final barbs the same length as the main ones. "See if you can break that," she handed it to Denthryd, who gripped it as she had done, raising his shoulders and pushing down until his arms shook. The shaft didn't change shape a bit with this. He handed it to Tasha, and the same. Wystan waved it off. "Know what variety of tree this came from," Azuyia asked Tasha.

"I was hoping you'd know, Bos," the Breton replied seriously.

"Nope. This isn't Valenwood material, and unless Skyrim has sprouted a new genus of trees in the last generation I don't think you'll find it in any normal study. I mean c'mon," she chuckled, "I grew up in a tree. We know these things." The other three nodded. "I'd say it's a better chance of finding someone who knows about the forge pattern on the head. This is ebony metal. You're not going to have any old tinker putting these out on display."

"Something," Wystan started to say, "we're overlooking here in this, hm, discussion? How did a friggin arrow appear out of the sky at her feet?!"

"Like I say," Azuyia looked at him, "the best bet is to know about its manufacture. And if you haven't noticed we've been standing here quite a while. If the archer who shot this one wanted us dead, we'd be dead, or we're going to be dead, so relax."

"Relax. Oh, that's great," Wystan scoffed and crossed his arms.

Ignoring him, Azuyia wrapped the arrow up in the banner and held it with the head end facing down, and spoke to Tasha. "What do you see in that stone over there? I saw a little of the carving, but nothing clearly."

"That," Tasha turned her body in the direction of the hillside, "that's ancient Nordic. I had a funny feeling when I took a walk earlier. Notice how, amidst all this grassland, this one hill face so sharply drops like that? I mean, it's engin _eered_ , guys."

 _Oh_ , Denthryd sighed. _That_.

"The markings are first era ancient Nordic."

"First era?" Denthryd exclaimed. "This thing?"

"Yes," the Tasha replied, "I've seen fragments and rubbings.

"Is that so?" the Eastmarcher lifted an eyebrow at her. "And does Southall have an exhange agreement with Skyrim about national antiquities?"

"Not the time, Den," Azuyia said.

"They do make it on the market, Zu," Wystan offered.

"That another thing daddy made his gold on, buddy," Denthryd asked Wystan sharply.

"My father," Wystan yelled back, "deals in commodities only! Business is his business, and you gotta know things like this," he pointed at the inscription, "if you want to survive. _He_ doesn't deal in graverobbery, but there are plenty who do." Denthryd grumbled and raised his head a little. "Shee! Dad doesn't go to church, but we're Nords as much as you ... _brother_."

"Guys ... " Azuyia said at her feet.

"An ... y ... wayyy," Tasha continued, "first era archaeological finds are all over Tamriel, folks. High Rock had a section devoted to its texts. This," she motioned with both arms like a stage usher for them to walk with her, "is definitely first era. Don't ask me what century, I do not know. My specialty before I completed my basic form," she laughed, "was ballads. They have specialists who know these things just as they do in Winterhold. My point," she put her hands on her hips, nodding at the stone surface, "was that there is the tip of a rune, see, there? You don't want to go fiddling with this surface. You don't know what that rune will do."

"K. Sooo ... " Wystan asked, "what now?"

Tasha turned to Azuyia. "I think our resident fletching master has the best idea. Whoever shot at me doesn't want us near this." She turned and walked back toward the direction of the upward winding path to the top of the hillock.

"I still don't get ... " Denthryd said at the backs of the two others as they followed Tasha.

"Neither do I," Azuyia said, "but we're still alive."

The four had gotten off the steppe two days ago, down a trail around a lake in between a cluster of low hills. There were five buildings around a windmill. Settling in that evening at the Goat Hustle Tavern with the relief of a deep log fireplace and chairs around a table, they drank earthenware steins with pewter lids of some thick, nearly black local brew and tried not to wolf the first pie they'd had in a week. Folks from what they learned was Moraineton didn't give them any particular notice. One friendly couple had asked who they were, listened to their bear story, shared a drink. A young woman still in dusty miller's apron played a lively round on a scratched, plain lute holding it by one arm and running her fingertips across the strings much faster than the well-worn Cyrodiilic orchestrations, and the mostly shouted rather than sung chorus a tad bawdier. People clapped and swung each other by the shoulder in to the public house at dusk.

Tasha stood across the room talking with the fellow musician later on. Denthryd had fallen fast asleep in his chair leaning up against the wall next to the fireplace, feet on another chair. Wystan and Azuyia sat in their food dreams with untouched glass gills of the inn's special aqua vita watching people, now sedately talking and laughing together. The Bosmer had had her eye on one of them even through a stomach about to pop with that delicious wild boar and goat cheese sausage, an elderly man with long, white hair pulled into a ponytail that stretched to the middle of his back. Unlike everyone else she could make out in the darkened room, the fire lower and night fallen, he had no work grit on his hands and face, perhaps a lodger like they were.

The guy did, though, stand out to her. For one, he wore sleeveless hunter's field clothes. The jerkin looked different, too, the rabbit fur not shifting and flowing like a shirt; it looked reinforced and stiff. His fur pants, too, didn't move as much when he walked, and were not tucked into his boots. Azuyia knew they didn't need local trouble at the end of a hard week's hike, and wanted a soft bed for at least eight hours, so she put her palm to her forhead and let her hair drop around her face, walked back from the bar with the gill past the man sitting at the central common table. He had his back to the path she took and was talking across the table with another man about his age, a farmer by the hat hanging from its cord around his neck. She wanted a look at his shoes. The man in hunter's fur also, curiously, had a thin scarf wrapped around his forehead that tied around the back and fell to the nape of his neck, the only one in the room wearing such, and it hadn't seemed to her the type of headwear senior Nords wore during their merry time. The Troupe show had sold scores of brightly dyed items like that one, and they almost exclusively found themselves on the heads of kids and teenagers.

The fur trousers draped to the floor so she only got a fast peek at the instep and partial sole of his one foot that was pulled back under the bench. They weren't the light chamois many hunters wore on day trips or if they pitched tent permanently on a plentiful range, either case because you'd want to move fast and as quietly as possible. The man wore bouilli boots with thick soles and dull metal reinforcement wrapping around the front of the instep and reaching almost to the top of the toes. She kept up her drunk act and bent down to put her arms around a surprised Wystan, hugging him with a noisy _hey-baby_ and giggling.

"Zuyi," the perplexed merchant's son asked her when she kerwhumped into her seat and pulled it up close to him, leaning her head on his shoulder, and whispering in his ear.

"See that older fella on our side of the long table, down there? The one in hunting gear?"

"Yeah?"

"Not a hunter, and not local."

"So? It's an inn, Zuyia. What .. ?" He pushed at her.

"Hon-eyyyy!" She acted flip as he got up and walked in the direction of the room hallway in the far corner behind the seats, ran her hand through her hair dramatically and exaggerated her shoulders and hips as she followed him. "Don't be like thaaaat!"

Wystan had gone to their shared room with the two beds. She still chuckled inside since she and Denthryd would be sharing one of them, and Tasha had to put up with him for the night. _She's a tough girl_ , Azuyia laughed to herself, and _Wystan, I think, wants to wake up intact, shall we say?_

He was laying with his hands behind his head. Azuyia pulled one of the two chairs from the side table, carried it over, and sat down with the back in front of her next to the bed.

"Zu ... I'm tired. Drop it. And what's with the weirdness," he gestured pulling one hand out from under the pillow.

She spoke in a quiet voice. "That man is wearing armor, Wys. Did you see any regimental color anywhere here or out there?"

"No, and who cares. And the guy must be _eighty_ , for Talos! Probably a reservist who settled here."

"I don't think so."

"Zuyia," Wystan said, sitting up and sitting crosslegged on the bed, "what ... is all this about, hm? Some tough old grandpa in his leathers and do-rag telling war stories with his mates. That would be my guess."

"Well I don't suppose you watched him walk in, or walk around, did you? That _grandpa_ moves a lot faster than any normal eighty-year old Nord man I've ever seen. Oh, he's no young onion, but his arms and legs don't look nearly as stiff."

"And?" Wystan yawned and spread back out.

"And when he was walking I noticed two things about his body."

"Not Den?"

"Would you grow up and listen," Azuyia raised her whispered tone a bit, "this is serious. We need to keep an eye on our surroundings just like ... out ... there!" She pointed out in the abstract beyond the wall. "You don't know _who_ walks through these little hamlets, not in these times. Not in any times."

"Oh ... kayy. What's so un-copacetic about the way he walks?"

Ignoring the sarcasm, Azuyia answered him. "He has archer's scars on his left arm, and an archer's right hand. See?" She curled her fingers. "Like this. We're all archers in Valenwood. Taught to shoot as soon as we can hold a bow. My country doesn't have the kind of killing fields that Skyrim has, and we have known forever that we aren't usually going to win toe-to-toe with an Altmer main line. I grew up with bows, hell," she spaced off with her eyes elevated, then returning her gaze to Wystan, "I can make one myself. Part of primary school. Didn't learn any metal trade, so that would be where I went to an armory, but I could fletch a bow good enough to bring down a deer at three hundred paces."

Wystan's eyes widened where he lay, still. He turned on one elbow and looked at her. She was nodding at him matter-of-factly.

"Seriously?"

"Yep."

"That's some ... shooting, Zu. Why ... didn't you bring one with you on all this?"

"Didn't think we'd need it, didn't want to carry the extra weight. We've gotfood, and with those packs anything gets close enough a sax and flames would do a lot more damage. Besides," she poked back at him, grinning, "I've got two biiiig, stronnng men to look after a widdw elfy."

Wystan smiled wrily. "Don't forget Lady Razrtip out there."

"Anyway. You grow up around bows and arrows, and the people who use them, you know what you're looking at. I'd bet that guy's right hand is bent like that from drawing a bow for most of eight decades. His walk, too, looks like it. It's hard to describe, just a minute difference in the way he swings his arms. They say an archer's skeleton shows a right shoulder disproportionate to the left, vice-versa if it's from a southpaw. His right arm moves like an archer's, and by that I mean a trained, military specialist who spends all day practicing a draw, testing the draws of other bows, target shooting. That kind of archer breathes arrows the way the career line infantry swing two-stone hammers. See the size of those two Watch we stayed with?"

"Yeah I know about those types. Some in my town, all Great War vetarans, they'd go out and do unarmed sparring during the spring plough, men and women in their sixties. Made an impression on me as a boy."

The door opened to a quite sleepy-looking Denthryd, who mumbled something incoherently and threw himself face down on the other bed, back out after a couple of breaths.

"You were saying 'of archers and lummoxes,'" he smirked.

Azuyia gave him a look. "I'm going to see where Tasha's gotten herself," she said, standing up and leaving the chair, closing the door quietly behind her.

"Tash ... aaa. Put the ... knife ... downnn," Azuyia said.

The Bosmer had been sitting out in the late public room, sipping at one of the two gills she and Wystan had ordered hours ago, watching people leave. The bartender Jarn was pushing chairs against the wall, and so the inkeepers wiped plates next to a basin of water behind the bar. The man in the hunting armor was one of two still there other than she and Tasha. He sat in the same spot on the bench at the common table, talking, now more audible with the rest of the village gone home to bed.

" ... movement in the pass, recruits ... " she heard him say to the farmer.

" ... hope that never reaches Moraineton, man ... " the other was saying.

 _Yep, military_ , she had thought. _Just ducky if we've walked into a skirmish zone_.

Tasha appeared at the open doorway of the other room hallway diagonal from the one with the four doors where they four had lodged for the night. She had her left hand on the pommel of her sword in the stiff swagger one sees when members of only neutrally friendly units of one type or the other happen on each other in a room. _Uh, oh. What's she thinking_ , went through Azuyia's mind. _She's got the arrow with her._

Tasha walked right up to the man and stood over him. The bartender had noticed her, and the two innkeepers stood at the open end of the bar. None were armed, but they hadn't taken long to notice just a few steps across the room from a doorway. Fights start fast in roadside inns.

"Evening!" Tasha loudly introduced herself by full name, making Azuyia wince. "Ever heard of me?"

The man in hunting gear eyed her without an expression. "Should I have?" His conversation mate had started to get up and back away towards the wall. Tasha Razrtip had the scars and the ink. These two needed a wide berth.

"Lead singer for Tasha's Troupe, out of High Rock, out on tour," she continued with a brazen volume, "seeing ... the country, eh?" She took a seat where the farmer had been all night across from the man, making an obvious show of pulling her sword out from her belt and resting it on the table at her left along with the arrow wrapped in a bundle. The man did not move, and his face remained unexpressive.

"Heard you talking, standing over there," she motioned with her head towards the hallway, "bout troops along the Rift."

"What's it to you, sis?" he replied in a weathered bass, hands clasped loosely on the table. "You auxiliary or somethin," he asked gruffly.

"Nuuuu," she intoned, she said slowly, pulling at the bottom edge of the arrow's wrappings until it clinked on the table, tossing the banner past her sword, "that's why I'd like your expert opinion." The man's eyes slowly lowered to the arrow and then back to her. He did not say anything. "See ... I'm just a nosy outta-towner looking in the open doorways here," she got out before a throat cleared from the direction of the bar, "and I see a Legion bow hanging in one of them that's big enough to fire one of these," she ran her hand palm upwards up and down in the air just above the arrow. "And I kinda wonder," she began before performing a maneuver Azuyia would have been amazed to see an Altmer acrobat perform, placing her hands in a split second flat on the table and pushing the bench out from behind her legs, launching her entire body full extended into the air and over the man's head to recover on her feet behind him. She had a single-edged glass blade at his throat and the other hand gripping the front of his cuirass.

The man smiled and barely moved his eyebrows. "You kill me, here," he said to her, "and you will die getting in _there_."

"Where!"

"You're not stupid enough to break in there on your own, are you?"

"Who are you?!"

Azuyia rushed over. They were a long way from Solitude and this was Talos country. Whomever the man with the bow was, they did not want to murder him in front of four peasants on their way to the national Legion headquarters.

"Tasha? _What_ are you doing?"

"What's it look like, Zu, getting answers."

The man spoke up in the same deliberate timbre. Through it the two of them thought they might hear noble birth in its inflection, courtly precision. "Guard Senior, Aethelweard, Rift Sentinels. I am here in Moraineton on orders."

 _At your age_ , the bard thought incredulously. Tasha lifted the knife away from him and took a step back, walking back around to her katana and sheathing the smaller blade behind her back, left fingertips on the sword sheath.

"Long way from there, my friend."

"The Sentinels are in and around Riften, yes, but that's just the funding and the main base on the way east to Fort Dawnguard. We have posts in every hold and along the entire Skyrim border."

 _This must be one very, very secure unit_ , Azuyia thought, _for him to be letting that much information go to two strangers in front of four townfolk._

"So it was you," she persisted. "Helluva shot. Can't," she attempted fully expecting to get nothing, "figure out where you could have hidden to take any sort of a vantage point."

Aethelweard's next movement had the effect even on a master bard, and Tasha to boot, that a statue suddenly cracking a smile would have should you pass such a magical display.

"I don't think so," his slight chuckle stirring deep down to the floor. "And we three need to talk," he turned his head to Azuyia, "you, too, Bosmer. And your two novice friends."


	27. Chapter 27

Tasha sat back down at the table. Sonnjifa, the innkeeper, walked cautiously over. Her husband, the farmer, and the bartender had muttered their farewells and left quickly.

"I don't care what this is, and I don't want to know, but you two ... is this going to be trouble?" She did look afraid of the two seated, yet continued in a clear declaration. "Because we have full authority to hang here, in this village, got it? I have to wake up the watch for this?"

Azuyia stepped forward. "Ma'am, no. They," she indicated, "will take it elsewhere."

"Good. And you will be leaving at daybreak. Tab and room," she pointed at the bar. Before Azuyia started to follow her, Tasha tossed a purse at her and nodded.

Aethelweard had a horse in the Moraineton stables, rode at their pace. He had the Imperial bow and a full quiver of arrows on his back and a scramasax at his waist. Besides the saddle bags to his left and a compact hunting tent tied in a bearskin blanket behind his saddle, he had a stiff roll of canvas that ran from the horse's neck down to its leg on the other.

Azuyia was in a rotten mood from staying up all night in the public room, barely getting a wink leaned against the wall while Tasha and Aethelweard whispered. Sonnjifa had actually left them to theirselves and gone upstairs for the night, and they had returned just as the crack under the tavern door lit up slightly blue. Denthryd and Wystan, yes, had been allowed to slumber, and were in fine, bouncy form going back and forth about nothing (while wondering who this old guy on horseback was, accompanying them). They had gotten a brief note about it from Azuyia when she shook them awake, starting with their departure without an inn breakfast. When they had emerged out into the Moraineton street, a dozen solid-looking men and women in work tunics stood there with some form of steel strapped to their waist or back. Sonnjifa and Jarn also wore sashes of faded crimson.

"I will ride with you," Aethelweard once they had walked up the hills on the opposite end of the town, heading due north, "until we find you another place to stay. Might I say you're a little foolhardy to set out in such, ha, numbers weighted down with a dinner table on your back." _He's got to be high born_ , they thought in their turns, _that's a courtier's way of saying things_ , face held high, speaking without moving his eyes from the horizon. "Did you really expect to defend yourselves against two or three sabre cats like thaaat?"

Wystan and Denthryd trucked on through the day passing a bottle of something back and forth, enjoying heck out themselves as they walked behind the other three, Tasha and Azuyia on either side of the Guard. It would have seemed like the verbal tussling they had made their habit these months, particularly on raw mornings at a dead fire, had meshed with the omnipresent survival impulse, so let's just be merry and have done with it, no? They carried on into crass jokes and dormitory language, Azuyia stopping the entire caravan at one point to blow her top about asinine behavior and Tasha's unconcealed snickering. Aethelweard's presence foreshortened the comedy.

"We camp here," he pronounced, getting down from his horse and filling a water bag to hold to its mouth.

They had set their team record that day on foot. Nobody wanted to admit to the Guard that they were tired. For Tasha, it was the master's pride. She had been on forced marches, of a kind, in her day. Forty miles, no problem, she pushed down through her aching shins. Azuyia hit a half gill of skooma at noon, no questions asked, although discreetly behind a raised water bottle so she wouldn't have to deal with annoying questions. Feeling alright, there? _No, you idiot! Not on a couple hours' sleep in two days and over sixty miles_. She had also made plans for the evening.

 _This is not going to be for nothing_ , she thought.

Wystan and Denthryd, so it would go, enjoyed the first half of the day's hike. They merrily relieved themselves as the group pressed on without them probably a score, even once or twice getting into a footrace with the extant four stone or so rations on their back. It would be in late afternoon that petitions of one sort or the other would issue to the other three. _Hey guys, uh, why this much ground today_ and _wouldn't it be a good to camp there with water_ came the simple logic first, the unsubtle "I'm tired" second. Tasha would smile smugly through her sore feet, Azuyia let the moon sugar take her head on a secondary trek into the possibilities of new magic for the rest of the day. They laid out their trail blankets and with sighs of relief set down the heavy provision packs. Aethelweard, having a horse to carry for him, pitched a one-man hunter's tent, and walked off.

"Where's he going?" Wystan exhaled, pulling his boots off, wincing.

"Who cares, let's start a fire. I'm starving!" Denthryd limped from his blanket

The spot their leader had chosen was a clear patch of rocky soil on top of a hillock where the grasses weren't growing in more than sparse, low sprigs with some goldenrod and other weeds.

"I do hope," Aethelweard said breaking apart a hard biscuit, sitting with them next to the fire, "that you've been keeping three watches through each night?"

"Yes. We have," Azuyia answered shortly. She hadn't touched any food, sat staring at the fire.

"Good," he replied, chewing. "A fire on a hilltop out in the steppe. Your scent out for a couple miles. Get the picture?"

"We're not," Tasha began to say out of the corner of her mouth not puffing at the long mammoth ivory pipe, then staying silent. Denthryd and Wystan had exhanged a glance or two as they sopped the camp stew with biscuits and ate like dogs, gulped water before the taskmaster's reminder about trail sickness caused by overconsumption. Azuyia wasn't eating or drinking a thing.

"Hey," Tasha leaned over and snapped a finger in front of the Bosmer's face, "yoohoo. Zuyi?"

Azuyia got up slowly when the quick supper was ending and went to her pack, opening it to reach around inside. She walked back into the firelight carrying a shiny piece of metal in her right hand. "Okay, guard," she said with a clear, firm voice, "we're gonna talk." At this she placed the gold circlet inlaid with rubies onto her forehead and opened he eyes wide, staring at Aethelweard there on her feet. The other three noticed the change in him very quickly. His eyes went wide, too, locked on her. The two of them remained silent and motionless.

Tasha bolted up, the pipe dropping from her mouth on the ground. Wystan and Denthryd, full and almost falling asleep, perked up and watched lying on their sides. Tasha said nothing but paced slowly around their circle, all the way around, looking right at Azuyia and Aethelweard. She made a couple of circuits before stopping and taking a step backwards, standing oddly with her hands on the tops of her thighs and chin down toward her chest, mouth tensed. She, too, remained silent. The two reclining Nords had no idea what was going on, exactly, but it smelled like magicka. They did not move, either, just laid on their sides, watched, and waited. After a few minutes, the Guard exhaled sharply and sprang up. He shook his head. Azuyia calmly let her arms dangle by her sides.

"Yhhouu!" he hissed at her.

Azuyia smiled grimly at him.

"Stendarr!" he yelled, drawing his sax in his left hand, his outstretched right instantly radiating a shimmering translucent oval as tall and wide as he was.

Denthryd and Wystan remained frozen.

"Do you realize where we were? Do you," he yelled at Azuyia.

"In my spell, guard, where you told me about your post and that tomb."

" _That tomb does not matter!_ It," he, having since dissipated the ward and sheathed the sax (which Tasha had noted was forged from solid silver), said to her and sitting back by the dying fire at daybreak, "is important, but NOTHING like what you have done with _that_ ," he pointed at her forehead, sitting crosslegged. Nobody had slept that night, again for Tasha and Azuyia, the latter having openly sipped another spoonful of skooma in front of an astonished Wystan and a worried Denthryd.

"Azuyia," Denthryd spoke up, having only listened as she, Aethelweard, and occasionally Tasha had gone back and forth in argument for at least an hour, "what exactly is that?" He had only understood fragments of their cryptic debate which sounded like it was being edited in front of the other two novices on purpose.

"I got it at the ReachCon, Den," she said in a monotone, staring at him oddly and still wearing the circlet, "while you two were ogling hot blacksmiths."

"Oh man, illusion."

"Yes. Illusion."

Wystan tried, "Hey Zuyia, what's so special about now? Why did you use it? Okay, we're in this together, hm?"

She turned, and the look she gave him and the much increased visibility of her facial features when the sun rose scared him. Denthryd let out a gasp. Azuyia's delicate, lightly earthtoned face had ever so slightly changed, a hardening in her cheeks commonly thought of as "chiseled" in attractive men and women, only this was a cold set of new lines around her cheekbones, jaw, both sides of her forehead. He held her face into his chest and motioned the others away.

"Zuyia! What did you do?!"

He was overtaken and let her push herself away from him. She was weaving a little in her torso, and her drifted a little side to side. He held her by the shoulders and drew in breaths, fighting tears. She passed out in his arms. Denthryd cried openly and held her, listening to her mouth for her breath. Before the others inevitably would come, he tore a strip off the edge of his wool blanket and wrapped it around her head. Azuyia had not fallen, but after removing her circlet and putting it in his own pack as she lay there, the most obvious change to her physiognomy made Denthryd's heart race and his hands shake as he fumbled with supplies. Under the jeweled band, in the spot directly under its central round ruby, he would discover a third eye in the middle of her forehead, opening and closing as her other natural eyes did. His mind raced as he held her. _What do I do ... what do I do?!_

Tasha spoke across the smoking ember pit to Aethelweard. "Do we need to lash her to your horse?"

He replied emotionlessly, "We are not going anywhere. No physician will have anything for her. Anywhere. I doubt that any of you would have the magic, either, and I am not drawing any attention to this at all. Is that clear?"

He heard a protest from Wystan and a threat from Tasha in his rushing ears as he walked over to his horse and unfastened the thick canvas roll at its right side, and walked back to stand with feet at shoulder's width and right arm extended. In his right hand he held the upper limb of a bow taller than he was, oddly asymmetrical with the riser set further down and a short lower limb.

"You're right to ask the question, bard," he said straight ahead, Tasha being slightly behind him and to his left as he fixed his eyes on Azuyia and Denthryd there on the ground, "I was not, in fact, hiding in some ranger's blind off in the grass. It was a tree off the Hjall River." Neither of the two protesting their delay could breathe the next questions on their mind. He had hit a bullseye at Tasha's feet from more than a mile. "So we understand each other, no? You will stay here, all of you, and make camp. We will keep our eyes and ears open. You two," he pointed first at Wystan, then at Denthryd just as long regardless of the novice's desperate state of mind, "will stow the damn booze and cut tonight's firewood. And arm your damn selves."

Tasha managed to speak. "Tell me, colleague," she attempted, "if you could kill all of us at the run, and we are nothing more than interlopers on your post, why? Why are _you_ staying? Why not walk away?"

Aethelweard turned his head, and then faced back as he had been. "Because of what I saw while she was acting like a Guard Senior ridden from that direction!" He pointed north. "Because now I'm in on her little game, and _they_ know!" He spat to his right.

"Who?! What are you talking about?"

"Those in this world who know when toys like that get into the hands of stupid children." He pointed out over the plains north. "That headband she's got uses magicka more comprehensive, deeper, older than some cheap diplomat's tricks. And how'd she get it?! You know?" He turned to Tasha.

"Don't look at me," she answered, nodding to Wystan.

"You?! Novice? Been digging around in other graves?"

Wystan, to say the least, was despondent and miserable. He had brought them there. "I ... know where she got it. Don't know who sold it to her, how much, where it's from, nothing."

"Oh that's brilliant, young man," the Guard backhanded, as if they were attending court.

"I know. We should have waited."

"To say ... the ... _least_ ," Aethelweard thundered at him.

"Yes. We should not have been there. It was adepts. I had no idea she had been buying or trading." He looked down at Denthryd, who was still holding the sleeping Azuyia in his arms and pressing his face to the top of her head.

"You may not want to hear this," the Guard Senior spoke to the campground, "but death might be preferable to what she may have in store for her."

They silently went about their camp chores. Tasha stood beside the Paleman in the early afternoon. Denthryd had gone off on a round of gathering and foraging with Wystan at her urging for safety's sake and his sanity. He hadn't eaten anything or had any water. The Heartfire days were not as intense, and the nightly chill positively balmy next to the steppe winter, nevertheless they had better mind their bodies in this turn of events if they had a hope of finishing the trip to Solitude. Azuyia had been out the entire time. Denthryd laid her out gently on the ground next to the cold firepit and spread a blanket over her, rolling his blanket behind her head after wrapping it in a strip of wool he cut ragged from his blanket. It had taken two or three convincings by Wystan for him to quit standing over her and leave to make their rounds.

"Now that the kids are asleep or off ... "

"Watch what you say, sister," Aethelweard growled.

"Hey. We did what you asked. Left the tomb alone. _I_ was the one who pulled them away from it, okay? I didn't make it all the way from an island off the Northpoint coast when I was thirteen without learning the craft a long time ago."

"Then you know, like a mage knows, that you do not know. That there is an unlimited magicka out there."

" _Yes_ ," she replied emphatically, "and what's your point?"

"That she has meddled in the fabric of space and time with that device. It's powered by much more than adept machination, and intended for something ... important. How? How did such an item wind up with a," he scoffed, "county mountebank?"

"I don't know, man. That's something only she can answer. But you're not telling me. What did you see, and who are _they_ that you refer to?"

Aethelweard turned and faced her, their boots nearly touching. "Like ... I ... said. There are those in Skyrim who know when this level of magic is invoked."

"Thalmor?"

"Among others. They're only the most obvious, politically most influential party. And they are here on the ground."

"So who, then?!"

"Need to know, Tasha Razrtip. I can say this: the Rift Sentinels maintain contact with these other groups, not the Thalmor, to be sure, no. We hunt those Altmer bastards any time given the signal. And others. Ancient orders. That's all you need to know."

She nodded, pondering, took a step away, crossed her arms. "And you saw?"

"I saw ... Oblivion."

Tasha's interior strut vanished. _Oh Akatosh, I had hoped against hope._

Denthryd and Wystan sat with the older man talking while the fire caught that evening. Tasha had moved her blanket next to Azuyia and sat most of the past hour. The Bosmer had stirred, sat up incoherently, tried to say something within the hour, but weakly sank back. Tasha had lifted her head to sip water before the other passed out again. The bard lay on her side with her arm around Azuyia, watching her.

"You're a ranger battalion, then," Wystan kept the conversation going between the staid Guard and Denthryd, who was drinking silently from a wineskin.

"That's one way of describing us," Aethelweard replied. "We work exclusively in reconnaissance and long watch deployments. No line engagements, and no attachment to main armies."

"Your unit, the Sentinels. You all, heh, okay sounds stupid, stand guard?"

"Precisely," the older man drew from a pipe made from some sort of seashell.

Wystan was acting morale meister this evening. When he and Denthryd had returned from a long hike gathering any dry wood they could find, he saw Tasha for once curiously relaxed, contemplative. Aethelweard alternated between field maintenance like tightening lashings or shaving the frayed end of a belt, and Azuyia slept. _No campfire tales this evening, m'boy,_ he thought to himself. _Man this big sky goes on forever._

"And you've done that all your life?"

Aethelweard's tanned face shifted in what may have been a patient, silent sigh. "I began my service when I was a boy of seven," he pulled from his pipe and motioned for Denthryd to pass the wine, taking a slug and handing it to Wystan.

"It was the year Riften burned. My father, a loyalist, had fought with the jarl's guard against the rebels and watched the great city destroyed. While I was growing up, the ... recon-struction," he said, spelling out the last word deliberately, "required anyone not killed or imprisoned for treason. Father was not a soldier. He was ... a banker. Lost all of his wealth to looting."

Aethelweard stopped and took a draw of smoke.

"We all had to work, children even. A legion of medium infantry, the Seventh Blues named after the palace itself, was sent from Solitude to secure the immediate hold."

"My parents ... fought for the Seventh," Denthryd spoke up for the first time, "auxiliaries out of Eastmarch, southeastern mountain corps. Cheydinhal."

Aethelweard nodded at him. "Father enlisted me in the support teams since there was nobody else to look after me. I cleaned, swept, carried, whatever a small child could do in support of an encampment of five thousand outside the city walls. I didn't see much of him after that what with the reconstruction. He had been given a civic appointment by the jarl in recognition of his part in the defense. Sealed letters with a quarter or a half would arrive every now and then at camp. Heh," he smiled, "I had one of my first septims forged into the pommel of my enlistment gladius. Those legionnaires became my aunts and uncles. Teachers, guides. Then trainers. I was born with eagle eyesight. One of them told me to come to the practice range one day when I was nine, handed me my first light hunting bow. Damn thing was as tall as I was. Taught me to draw the string. I could shoot a year later."

"Wow, man," Wystan said brightly, knowing how he sounded, and still playing out for the campfire's sake.

Aethelweard continued: "From then until I was seventeen I shot target at the Seventh camp. Did some hunting out in the hold. Talked to anyone from another unit passing through the Riften area for any reason. I paid my way into the Seventh as an archer on my seventeenth birthday. For thirty-three years I went with the Seventh from one end of the country to the other and most major points in between. Had stays in Solitude, too. Some years were spitpolish drills, others we lived in freezing tents securing farmlands. Thirty-three years of shooting game for dinner, bears and wolves, even some cats. And raider bands. All that was easy. Then the Great War came." He stopped and took draws off his pipe, motioned for the wine, drank a few deep draughts. "When those _bastarts_ had had done with all their arrangements, the Imperials and the Thalmor, what was left of the Seventh in Cyrodiil ... hm, I was one of them. Some frip tribune gave me a sealed commendation writ with his majesty's purple wax, supposedly, and I was told I could retire after thirty-eight years with the full _veteranus_ honors to sit there," he exhaled, "in some boarding house and collect my stipend. Right."

Denthryd spoke up, looking at the fire. "What brought you back to the Rift? I mean, what of your father?"

"He had been dead for many years. No, I didn't stay in Riften long. Their ... attempt at putting a noble house back on the pilings that used to hold the old city ... the fresh cedar and redwood, plaster that I had seen go up as a boy was rotting even then. But enough. I had been told of a special force that had been designed and funded by a dying thane out in the hold east of the city on the road to the abandoned Castle Dawnguard. Cynward remembered the crisis behind the eventual rebellion in the Rift, had been friends with my father in fact. My father was also a thane of the Rift, although just a titled businessman really. House Engrettr – Meadowlaw, Cyward's line – had maintained lands in the hold for many centuries since the early days of Talos, a noble Nord family who had seen ambassadors to and from Morrowind. He foresaw what a war like the one with the Thalmor would do to Skyrim's soul. And he was right!" Aethelweard growled through his clenched teeth. "Based on his own service in the jarl's personal guard and communications with generals and legates all over the country, he formulated the plan for a new type of unit. It would draw exclusively from blooded veterans personally selected by the Guards General, the head of my cohort, from suggestions coming from all over Skyrim and even some from other countries. High Rock, Hammerfell, Valenwood, even Argonians and Khajiit. All of us have seen campaigns, and we all initially report directly to the head of our regiment for six months of testing. And we all are, to the one, archers."

"Testing?" Wystan asked

"Testing. After we are accepted and inducted, we join a squad, the largest field units the Sentinels maintain. They usually number twenty-four. We carry out, as I say, long-range reconnaissance and guard posting, and may be out beyond contact for years. The order is to stand post until otherwise instructed."

"Oh."

"What about that bow man," Denthryd motioned to the weapon on the ground next to Aethelweard as long as a sleeping Nord.

"Yumi. It's Akaviri. You won't find one or anyone who can make one in all of Skyrim."

"Like the arrows?"

"Yes. Those of us who live long enough, and pass ... who are promoted for our service move into a team. Those are four only. Can't really say more about what we do there other than there are teams in every jarl's service. After that? Heh, "the firelight caught a slight smile, "perhaps on to a pair."

"A pair," Denthryd asked, fiddling with the skillet and setting out some of his pack's larder.

"Two of us. A team outside of the national schema and assigned to ... " he turned to Wystan with a smile, "the College of Winterhold." This impressed on the novice. Denthryd stopped what he was doing, stood up, and listened as well. "By that time we are ranked Guard, above House Guard and they above Field Guard, not that anyone even walking in the doors gives a toss about rank and file at that point. Not like the parade. Once in you could tell the Guards General outright that an operational plan is balls and you'd get your time to speak. Heh, you've earned your stripes. It ain't _about_ stripes at this point, lad. I was fifty-six by that point, 'bout average. Remember one youngster from a line Imperial cohort, the Colovian Mountain One, who went straight from the Great War to the Rift at thirty-nine when elected. Anyway if you're in a Guard pair you probably remember at least as much of the previous decades as the current archmage if he or she is human. Our contact with the general is concluded, and we follow orders that Winterhold specifically assigns. Things ... like monuments they don't want disturbed."

"I see," Wystan nodded. "You had introduced yourself to us as Guard Senior, then?"

"That's right."

"What does your ... rank mean, sir," Denthryd asked, placing the skillet on the edge of the fire and stirring the mixture.

"It means I was the one who survived the last hellstorm of the two of us, and I'm too blasted old to work with a new partner," he laughed and spat to his side. "Winterhold gives you your final post, and there you live."

The sky was dark, and these novices were hungry and distracted, so Aethelweard didn't get an eyeball when he made the hand sign, discreetly, as he packed more herbs in his pipe for a distract-forget cast he had learned so long ago it was like timing an egg.

 _And I am the only one, lads, so guess what?_


End file.
